IT Benchmarking introduced in India

QAI (India) Ltd. announced the formation of the Consortium

for IT Benchmarking in India in association with Larry Putnam's QSM Inc of USA. Putnam is

an internationally renowned authority - a guru, in the area of metrics, estimation, and

benchmarking.

The member organizations of the consortium will benefit

from benchmarking their performance against domestic as well as international software

projects, monitoring organizational parameters like performance, productivity and

profitability, and getting feedback from the Consortium.

The Consortium has Dr Pankaj Jalote as its advisor,

professor and head of the Dept of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT

Kanpur. Regular

meetings, get-togethers, video -conferences with international gurus, experience sharing

sessions, etc, will be an important feature of the Consortium.

The Consortium will bring out an annual India Competitive

Assessment Report, analyzing the Indian software industry against the rest of the world.

This macro level assessment will not only help Indian companies strategize but also the

Indian software industry in its march towards becoming a software superpower.

Each member organization submits to the Consortium the data

from representative projects it wants to benchmark. These projects are then entered into

the repository (already populated with data from over 4,800 international projects) using

the QSM tool called Slim (Software Life-cycle Management). The tool computes the

Productivity Index (PI) for projects and the entire organization. This single figure is a

reflection of the projects' performance on Size, Effort & Cost and Schedule. The PI

can also be mapped on the project's performance on Size, Effort & Cost and Schedule.

The PI can also be mapped on to the CMM Maturity Level.

Empirical data shows that a change of one point in PI can lead to change in schedule by

10% and effort by 30%. The QSM tool then generates several custom reports (using PI and

other parameters) for each organization, that are analyzed by QAI consultants. QAI would

also do a management briefing for each member organization on their own performance

vis-a-vis others.

During the course of the year, members can also avail other

benefits such as video conferencing, events, experience sharing sessions, member meets,

India assessments, etc. Some members of the Consortium include Motorola India Electronics

Ltd. (a SEI-CMM level 5 organization), ICIL (a SEI-CMM level 5 organization), Citicorp

Overseas Software Limited (COSL), Mahindra British Telecom (MBT). NIIT and ST

Microelectronics