Business-oriented process improvement: practices and experiences at Thales Naval The Netherlands (TNNL)

Over the last decade many organizations are increasingly concerned with the improvement of their hardware/software development processes. The Capability Maturity Model and ISO9001 are well-known approaches that are applied in these initiatives. However, one of the major bottlenecks to the success of process improvement is the lack of business goal orientation. Additionally, business-oriented improvement approaches often show a lack of process orientation. This paper reports on a process improvement initiative at Thales Naval Netherlands that attempts to combine the best of both worlds, i.e. process improvement and business goal orientation. Main factors in this approach are goal decomposition and the implementation of goal-oriented measurement on three organizational levels, i.e. the business, the process and the team level.