“Existing processes must be described before they can be well understood, managed, and improved. An organization must then define what these processes should be before attempting to support them with software engineering tools and methods; in fact, the definition forms the requirements for tool and method support. A variety of process description and definition technologies is available.” [*]

Ask a gardener how you can improve your software development practices and not only will you get a strange answer, you will also get a very confused look; unless of course the gardener use to be a software developer and knows your product (and current process) in an out. In other words… if one does not understand the inner working of things, such as the current chaos (or processes) or what goes on behind the scenes and how things work, then that person cannot provide you with useful information on how things can be improved.

A defined process is a prerequisite to process improvement; you cannot (well you could, but it would take quite a while) improve process without understanding what it is you are improving and how the change’s that are suggested and implemented will affect other processes.

As obvious as may sound; to begin improving process, you need to first draw it all out and identify all the bottle necks/issues one by one and strategize when and how to improve what. Many have wasted their time trying to implement something that may have worked elsewhere, or something that’s out of a book that’s there for the sake of “having a process” with no real benefit to the users.

When it comes to process – One size does not fit all.

[*] – Technical Report “Software Engineering Process Group Guide”. Flower, P & Rifkin, S, September 1990. CMU/SEI-90-TR-024, ESD-90-TR-255