How in-Step supports your organization to reach SPICE Level 3

Your Situation

Meeting your customers' demands to reach SPICE Level 3 is a challenge to your organization. You have little time to meet this goal, as the customer subjects future contracts to this condition.

The processes in your projects are supported by a number of tools. MS Office is most widely used for documentation and management of any kind of list. Some process areas use specialist tools like scheduling, bug tracking, requirements management and test management software. Some of the artifacts are subjected to version control and configuration management, but some are not – leading to more work for your teams.

As the project information is stored in a heterogeneous environment, you face two crucial disadvantages: You have no way to gain transparent insight into your projects' status, and your teams have to routinely cope with overhead effort to obtain necessary information. Any kind of error due to misinformation at any level can occur at any time, and as Murphy implies, the effort required to identify and correct the error binds your most valuable engineers and delays the most critical milestones.

Maturing your project organization

As a manager, you expect two things from your project organization: You want your teams to work as efficiently as possible, and you need to know which projects need your managerial attention. What's more, you want to find these things with as little effort as possible.

Improving the SPICE Level of your organization helps you to reach these goals. At SPICE Level 2, all project processes are planned, their performance controlled and all work products are placed under configuration control. The only way to achieve this efficiently is to introduce a single central project infrastructure, just like the one in-Step provides. This infrastructure ensures that every team member has immediate access to the right information at all times, minimizing information obtaining effort for all projects. Additionally, this infrastructure provides management with up-tp-date project information at any time.

Any further improvement of efficiency or transparency relies on standardization of the processes. AT SPICE Level 3, your projects execute their processes in similar ways – though not exactly the same way: life is never that simple. You have organization-wide standards for requirements and change management, scheduling and risk management and all other processes. This standardization leads to two main improvements: Your teams work more efficiently, as each team member finds the same kind of information in the same place in all their projects, and your management insight improves, as in Step can provide you with metrics from the project information. The more the project processes are standardized, the easier and faster it is to compare different projects and identify areas requiring managerial attention.

Compliance with Automotive SPICE Base Practices

The following table lists exemplary some Base Practices from Automotive SPICE and explains how in-Step SPICE Edition for Automotive supports your organization in complying with each SPICE requirement.

Base Practice	Purpose	Realization
Management Process Group: Project Management
MAN.3.BP1 Define the scope of work.	Define the work to be undertaken by the project, and confirm that the goals of the project are feasible with available resources and constraints.	in-Step provides all standard project planning and controlling features for activities, like work breakdown structure with workload and scheduling. Every activity is linked with its corresponding input or output work products providing easy access for team members.
MAN.3.BP2 Define project life cycle.	Define the life cycle for the project, which is appropriate to the scope, context, magnitude and complexity of the project.	The SPICE Compliant Process defines Execution Strategies for your projects which define the order of quality gates each project has to pass. This ensures a standard milestone structure and a standard project lifecycle for all projects.
MAN.3.BP6 Define and maintain project schedule.	Allocate resources to activities and determine schedule for each activity and for the whole project.	The activities are started and ended by the assigned users, and in-Step maintains the schedule correspondingly. The tedious task for the project manager of asking everyone on the team for a current status becomes unnecessary.
MAN.3.BP7 Identify and monitor project interfaces.	Identify and agree interfaces of the project with other (sub-) projects, organizational units and other stakeholders and monitor agreed commitments.	The detailed project documentation in in-Step, especially Customer Requirements and Acquisition Requirements, ensure detailed information about all parties. Generated Project Status Reports and online access to all current documentation make sure that everyone is well informed. Additionally line managers are integrated through features like resource management.
MAN.3.BP12 Act to correct deviations.	Take action when project goals are not achieved, correct deviations from plan and prevent recurrence of problems identified in the project. Update project plans accordingly.	A special view 'Plan Deviations' shows all the activities in a project which have exceeded their planned time, budget, cost or workload
Management Process Group: Risk Management
MAN.5.BP4 Analyze risks.	Analyze risks to determine the priority in which to apply resources to mitigate these risks.	Each risk is tracked in in-Step using a customizable risk form. It contains fields for areas and scope of damage, probability, delay and costs to assist in a detailed analysis.
MAN.5.BP6 Take corrective action.	When expected progress in risk mitigation is not achieved, take appropriate corrective action to reduce or avoid the impact of risk.	A special measure form is available and automatically linked to the risk, where mitigating or damage-reducing actions can be detailed. These measures are entered into the project plan once authorized by the project manager.
Supporting Life Cycle Processes: Configuration Management
SUP.8.BP3 Establish a configuration management system.	Establish a configuration management system, which provides an efficient means for handling the configuration items.	A full configuration management system for all project documents is built into in-Step. All required functions are available without further effort. Integration with MS Office makes versioning of work products easy for all team members.
SUP.8.BP5 Establish baselines.	Establish the internal and external (delivery) baselines according to the configuration management strategy.	in-Step includes functions that automatically draw baselines of all work products in a project when a quality gate is passed. Additionally, any folder or configuration can be baselined as needed.
Engineering process group: System Requirements Analysis
ENG.2.BP1 Identify System Requirements	Use the customer requirements as the basis for identifying the required functions and capabilities of the system and document the system requirements in a system requirements specification.	Each requirement is specified using a customizable requirement form and linked to the corresponding customer requirement. The System Requirements Specification is automatically generated from the system requirements.
ENG.2.BP6 Ensure consistency and bilateral traceability of customer requirements to system requirements	Ensure consistency of customer requirements to system requirements including verification criteria. Consistency is supported by establishing and maintaining bilateral traceability between the customer's requirements and system requirements including verification criteria.	Customer and System Requirements are linked in in-Step, with navigation in both directions. Filtered views highlight requirements with missing links. Verification criteria are specified in Test Cases which are again linked to the requirements on all levels.
Supporting Life Cycle Processes: Change Request Management
SUP.10.BP6 Assess the impact of the change.	Assess the technical impact and potential benefits of the change request.	Change Requests are linked to the requirements and work products they concern to support impact analysis and traceability.
SUP.10.BP8 Approve change requests before implementation.	Change requests are approved on the basis of priority and availability of resources before implementation.	The change status workflow in in-Step ensures that only users with the correct role can approve change requests. Affected requirements are invalidated automatically.
Process Improvement Process Group: Process Improvement
PIM.3.BP3 Establish process improvement goals.	Analysis of the current status of the existing process is performed, focusing on those processes from which improvement stimuli arise, resulting in improvement objectives for the processes being established.	A special project type for process improvement is part of the SPICE Compliant Process, containing all necessary documents. A Process Improvement Goals template is provided.


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