Jens Heidrich - Böcker

Aligning Organizations through Measurement

Aligning an organization’s goals and strategies requires specifying their rationales and connections so that the links are explicit and allow for analytic reasoning about what is successful and where improvement is necessary. This book provides guidance on how to achieve this alignment, how to monitor the success of goals and strategies and use measurement to recognize potential failures, and how to close alignment gaps. It uses the GQM+Strategies approach, which provides concepts and actionable steps for creating the link between goals and strategies across an organization and allows for measurement-based decision-making.After outlining the general motivation for organizational alignment through measurement, the GQM+Strategies approach is described concisely, with a focus on the basic model that is created and the process for creating and using this model. The recommended steps of all six phases of the process are then described in detail with the help of a comprehensive application example. Finally, the industrial challenges addressed by the method and cases of its application in industry are presented, and the relations to other approaches, such as Balanced Scorecard, are described. The book concludes with supplementary material, such as checklists and guidelines, to support the application of the method.This book is aimed at organization leaders, managers, decision makers, and other professionals interested in aligning their organization’s goals and strategies and establishing an efficient strategic measurement program. It is also interesting for academic researchers looking for mechanisms to integrate theirresearch results into organizational environments.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, PROFES 2013, held in Paphos, Cyprus, in June 2013. The 22 revised full papers presented together with 10 short papers and 2 tutorial papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on empirical software engineering, software process improvement, managing software processes, software measurement, decision support in software engineering, safety-critical software engineering, and software maintenance.