Practical Process Profiles

Practical Process Profiles has been used with clients in space industry, and the construction and transport industries. The clients wished to minimize management risks by optimizing processes with the greatest risk influence. Leistungs Consult worked with the clients to use its methodology and provide a fully compliant target process profile set as required by ISO 15504-4 and ISO 15504-9.

Practical Process Profiles and Risk Reduction

ISO/IEC 15504 has two purposes: process improvement and capability determination. The best way to set these capability levels is to investigate which processes have the biggest effect on achieving a desired target. This is achievable by two means - positive achievement of desired outcomes (value creation) and problem avoidance (risk reduction). The combination of the two approaches is called Practical Process Profiles. It is practical because it focuses attention on the specific processes that have the greatest impact of achieving the desired aims (e.g. safety, time to market, etc..) for a domain (e.g. automotive, aerospace, etc..). It can set targets for each process based upon both risk reduction and value creation.

Producing products, systems and software entails certain risks. Risks that occur become problems that require extra effort, reduce productivity, value creation and profitability, and can even cause business failures. Leistungs Consult used the methodology for the enterprises. Reducing the risk means that less time will be spent fixing problems and more time is spent profitably producing products for value creation.

  • For projects, this is called TBBDI Risk - Team Based Business Design Improvement - Risk.
  • For companies, this is called EBBDI - Enterprise Based Business Design Improvement.
  • For an industry or association, this is called IBBDI - Industry Based Business Design Improvement, for example, Automotive (& Automotive SPICE), Medical, Aerospace, and Financial industries.

Benefits

The TBBDI Risk, EBBDI and IBBDI methodologies have the following benefits:

  • Practical Process Profiles increase process (and hence business) efficiency.
  • Reduce process related risks. Handle safety, security and other industry specific risks.
  • Superior to existing target profile approaches in process and assessment standards while still  compatible with CMMI and ISO15504 (SPICE).
  • Reduce number of processes required to achieve business aims (value creation and Lean compatible).
  • Process improvement and optimisation activity can be based on industry, enterprise and project specific risk reduction. Each level brings particular benefits such as standardisation, competitive advantage, project efficiency.
  • Profiles can jointly highlight and prioritize value creation and risk reduction.

We provide training and consulting to allow you to benefit in optimizing your business. 

There is an article on Practical Process Profiles in IEEE ITPro .

Consider using Practical Process Profiles and TBBDI Risk when launching multiple team agile projects, and EBBDI when converting an entire organization to agile methods.