Practice: Organizational Process Performance (OPP)
The purpose of Organizational Process Performance (OPP) is to establish and maintain a quantitative understanding of the performance of the organization’s set of standard processes in support of quality and process-performance objectives, and to provide the process performance data, baselines, and models to quantitatively manage the organization’s projects.
Relationships
Goals

The following specific goals are associated with this process area:

SG 1 Establish Performance Baselines and Models

Baselines and models, which characterize the expected process performance of the organization's set of standard processes, are established and maintained.

Prior to establishing process-performance baselines and models, it is necessary to determine which processes are suitable to be measured (the Select Processes specific practice), which measures are useful for determining process performance (the Establish Process-Performance Measures specific practice), and the quality and process-performance objectives for those processes (the Establish Quality and Process-Performance Objectives specific practice). These specific practices are often interrelated and may need to be performed concurrently to select the appropriate processes, measures, and quality and processperformance objectives. Often, the selection of one process, measure, or objective will constrain the selection of the others. For example, if a certain process is selected, the measures and objectives for that process may be constrained by the process itself.

Main Description

Process performance is a measure of the actual results achieved by following a process. Process performance is characterized by process measures (e.g., effort, cycle time, and defect removal effectiveness) and product measures (e.g., reliability, defect density, capacity, response time, and cost).

The common measures for the organization are composed of process and product measures that can be used to summarize the actual performance of processes in individual projects in the organization. The organizational data for these measures are analyzed to establish a distribution and range of results, which characterize the expected performance of the process when used on any individual project in the organization.

In this process area, the phrase “quality and process-performance objectives” covers objectives and requirements for product quality, service quality, and process performance. As indicated above, the term “process performance” includes quality; however, to emphasize the importance of quality, the phrase “quality and process-performance objectives” is used rather than just “process-performance objectives.”

The expected process performance can be used in establishing the project’s quality and process-performance objectives and can be used as a baseline against which actual project performance can be compared. This information is used to quantitatively manage the project. Each quantitatively managed project, in turn, provides actual performance results that become a part of the baseline data for the organizational process assets.

The associated process-performance models are used to represent past and current process performance and to predict future results of the process. For example, the latent defects in the delivered product can be predicted using measurements of defects identified during product verification activities.

When the organization has measures, data, and analytical techniques for critical process, product, and service characteristics, it is able to do the following:

  • Determine whether processes are behaving consistently or have stable trends (i.e., are predictable)
  • Identify processes where the performance is within natural bounds that are consistent across process implementation teams
  • Establish criteria for identifying whether a process or subprocess should be statistically managed, and determine pertinent measures and analytical techniques to be used in such management
  • Identify processes that show unusual (e.g., sporadic or unpredictable) behavior
  • Identify any aspects of the processes that can be improved in the organization’s set of standard processes
  • Identify the implementation of a process which performs best
Additional Information

Refer to the Quantitative Project Management (QPM) process area for more information about the use of process-performance baselines and models.

Refer to the Measurement and Analysis (MA) process area for more information about specifying measures and collecting and analyzing data.