As I mentioned last fall, we manage our continual service improvement program quarter by quarter: each quarter we select certain critical projects, and then as we have time we "pick up" other work and add it to our list.

Separate but related to this concept of quarterly improvement "releases," we have also created a "semi-annual governing document review." Twice a year we get several relevant staff members together to review our "governing documents"--our policies, standards, and procedures. We don't make major changes, but we make sure that everything makes sense together, uses the latest template, etc.

Jim Haustein and Vick Dean of Cornell University delivered a presentation titled “Process Improvement in Higher Education” that discussed the process improvement program. Since mid-2007, Cornell has been using ITIL as a framework to create a more process-focused and service-focused organization. This was an excellent presentation filled with lessons learned and tips for people to take back to their institutions.

Here are a few quick points worth repeating:

Continuous management support is key to success.
Change Management was their first win.

Process maturity models

The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon created a standard in the mid-90s called the "Capability Maturity Model." This model could "rank" an organization's software development lifecycle from one to five based on its process maturity.