Envision a slow day, a slow meeting, and someone says in a nonchalant manner something like, "Raise your hand if you want to do a CMM." Only two hands go up—but it makes a difference whose hands. From this casual setting develops an all-out effort involving hundreds of people in training, implementing, and integrating the CMM into the development culture. Here is the story of how one large financial services company mobilized for its CMM initiative.

When you approach a process problem in the way your workgroup functions, you're implementing an organizational change. Organizations are systems of complex interrelationships. Explicit models can help you make strategic changes.

Tracking your project goals lets you know how well your improvement program is going, provides visibility early to detect problems, and gives you data to make your future plans more effective. Here's how to measure improvement based on your project's goals and problems.

A light and effective process with a service-oriented philosophy is key to meeting your organization's needs. Here are eight simple steps for creating a software engineering team that will turn customers into fans.