D EFINING AN APPROACH FOR MEASURING THE PERFORMANCE OF A SOFTWARE PROJECT ADOPTION :
A CASE STUDY IN THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY
F EDERAL U NIVERSITY OF P ERNAMBUCO
BS C IN C OMPUTER S CIENCE I NFORMATICS C ENTER
Student: Luiz Fernando dos Reis Guimarães ([email protected]) Advisor: Carina Frota Alves ([email protected])
August 26th, 2010
Summary
1. CONTEXT...3
2. GOALS...5
3. SCHEDULE...6
4. REFERENCES...7
5. Signatures...8
1.Context
The worldwide economic crisis faced by the world’s biggest companies in the last years has emphasized the urgency to drastically reduce development costs as a way to improve the efficiency and profitability of the programs and projects. Based on this situation, some companies started the adoption of new information systems to try to increase the reliability of its projects by reducing the lacks existing in the daily management practices.
The proposed work will analyze the case of the implantation of a software to support the adoption of a new program management methodology by a worldwide company of the automotive sector called Faurecia [3]. Using the case study as methodology of research, a proposal of an approach to measure the efficiency of that kind of adoption will be developed and applied on the data collected, as a way to produce some results that could be analyzed and validated. The case study will be developed using the steps and practices existing in the literature as those proposed on [1].
The objective of developing a Program in Faurecia is to have a product serial production, according to the goals of quality, costs and deadlines as defined in the acquisition phase. The rigorous application of the existing tools and methods of project management is central to the company’s approach of excellence and are closely linked to the existence of a Program Management System.
The Program Management System (PMS) is the methodology used by Faurecia Interior Systems (one of the division of the Faurecia Group) to manage its programs of projects. It is one of the main tools to ensure the success of a program and defines its milestones and their sequence in time. The company is currently migrating from the 7th to the 8th version, which is going to be presented in this section of the document.
This methodology is continuously changing to adapt itself to the external changes (Costumer focus changes), internal changes (Faurecia focus changes) and environment changes (changes in the Competition). This 8th version aims to solve some issues found in the management of the projects using the elderly versions and commonly identified by the project teams and administrative staff.
Associated with the new Program Management Systems, Faurecia IS decided to deploy a new technological support to manage all the information system related to the management of the programs. This system is formed by four major modules that shares all the information about the programs. The e-Step project, responsible for the integration of this system, takes advantage of latest technologies to ease the daily task management and accelerates programs based on key successful BG best practices.
Finally, with the implantation of the e-Step project is expected that the Faurecia Interior Systems become more on its programs activities.
The e-Step project proposes an architecture as we can see in the Figure 4 -1.
This organisation separates the three great domains of a program in the different information systems. All the data managed by those three systems must be easily accessed and indexed by an efficient search engine and agile/customized post- processor.
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Figure 4-1 e-Step Architecture
The Product Data Management Module is implemented using the MatrixOne software (the Faurecia version is called Galileo) provided by Enovia [2]. This module is responsible basically by the Program Documents (Team Central). In addition to that it is also responsible for the management of the Engineering Changes and manages the CAD access.
The Program Finance Module uses the FCS/4PEP software that is based on the SAP technologies [4]. This module manages the programs budget and changes and is responsible for cash planning and forecasting. It’s also in this module that the Business Plans of the programs are developed.
The Program Management Module uses the PSNext Software [5] provided by the Sciforma Company. This module is responsible for the management of the programs. It means that in this module the program teams can plan all the tasks of the Master and Operational Planning and it’s also in the module where the PMS V8 will be managed and the software was customized to be adapted to the particularities of the system.
The case study proposed by will be realized on the implantation of the PSNext software.
2.Goals
In particular, the goals of this study include:
Reviewing the literature regarding project efficiency;
Propose an approach to measure the efficiency of the adoption of a software project defining a set of KPIs;
Conduct a case study in a the company to collect all the data necessary;
Analyze the data collected to generate a KPI and some results that could be validated to ensure the efficiency of the adopted system;
Based on the results, create a set of recommendations for the case study and refine the proposed approach.
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3.Schedule
Activities August Septemb
er October Novembe r Scope Definition
Literature Review
Define research questions and propose the approach
Case Study - Data collection Case Study - Data analysis Report writing
Prepare presentation of work
4.References
[1] Verner, J.M.; Sampson, J.; Tosic, V.; Bakar, N.A.A.; Kitchenham, B.A.; , "Guidelines for industrially-based multiple case studies in software engineering," Research Challenges in Information Science, 2009. RCIS 2009. Third International Conference on , vol., no., pp.313-324, 22-24 April 2009
[2] Enovia. Access on August 26th 2010. Avaiable on:
www.3ds.com/products/enovia/welcome/
[3] Faurecia. Access on August 26th 2010. Avaiable on: www.faurecia.com [4] SAP. Access on August 26th 2010. Avaiable on: www.sap.com
[5] Sciforma. Access on August 26th 2010. Avaiable on: www.sciforma.com/en-uk/
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5.Signatures
By signing below both student and advisor commit themselves to carry out this work.
___________________________________________
Luiz Fernando dos Reis Guimarães – Student
__________________________________________
Carina Frota Alves – Advisor
