Benchmarking – Industry Data and Guidance for Improvement

Benchmarking today is the key instrument to determine the current situation of a company compared to other players in the market and beyond. This tutorial provides an overview on practical benchmarking in industry context. An interactive case study is used to practically engage participants in starting their own benchmarking. The tutorial will provide lots of hard data from our database and industry best practices. Results can be directly transferred to attendees own environment.

Target Audience: project managers, product managers, decision makers, architects, quality and test
Prerequisites: none
Level: Practicing

Extended Abstract
Benchmarking today is the key instrument to determine the current situation of a company compared to other players in the market and beyond. Often IT and product development are hampered by a mixture or insufficient processes, project dependencies, suppliers and frequent changes in scope and content. Increasing competitive pressure and an immense time to market push demand continuous improvements in cost and efficiency. But where to start? Which focus to take? How to know what competitors are doing better and what to learn from them?
Organically grown processes and organizations often do not allow to establish heavy improvement projects with long-term planned change activities. Rather, organizations need a quick yet precise insight into most relevant weaknesses and concrete levers how to improve with sustainable results. This is where benchmarking comes into the picture.
Professional benchmarking provides several improvement levers for companies:
1) Reduce Costs: Systematic evaluation of performance data pinpoints projects in trouble, areas that need attention, and opportunities to lower cost and improve quality
2) Increase Effectiveness: Successful project initiatives demand methods to institutionalize best practices and to facilitate the evaluation and use of information both timely and accurate
3) Manage Risk: Convenient, pro-active, and quantitative approach for enabling system governance and risk mitigation practices across projects and the entire company.
This tutorial provides an overview on practical benchmarking in industry context. It provides hard data and hands-on recommendations from our broad industry practice in applying benchmarks and thus improving the maturity of IT and development organizations. The Benchmarking Solution provides both qualitative and quantitative insight to measure and improve product development performance. Benchmarking has different levers, depending on how much energy can be invested and how deep the results should pinpoint to deficiencies and improvement levers.
Benchmarking starts with a framework to capture needs, ambitions and potential raw data. It is based on an assessment of the organizational capabilities. It rates organizations in a grid of different capability levels according to measured performance data, observed behaviors and achieved product development results. More detailed improvement potentials are achieved with a quantitative analysis. Techniques such as Function Points are used to objectively evaluate productivity results versus external performance data such in our benchmarking database with thousands of projects.
An interactive case study is used to practically engage participants in starting their own benchmarking. Benchmarking methods, both qualitative and quantitative, are applied to highlight concrete results from each step. The tutorial will provide lots of hard data from our database and best practices, such as the impact of requirements changes on productivity, the limits of global task distribution, test case effectiveness and efficiency, unit test coverage and quality - and many more.
We will introduce to current quantitative benchmarking tools, and show how to build and utilize a useful internal measurement repository for benchmarking and evaluating effort of own and purchased software systems. Our focus is to interactively and practically show how you can use qualitative and quantitative benchmarks for improving productivity with concrete results in your own organization. Results can be directly transferred to attendees own environment.