Contents
		Introduction  The benefits of quality  Who's paying?  Hard to measure  Executive summary

Case study: SoftwareMark gets Geometry into better shape
As a small developer with experience supplying a largely government clientele with systems that rely on geographical spatial information, Hobart development house Geometry has found and exploited its market niche to good effect.

Despite its history of success, however, the 10-person company's directors recognized that their ability to continue growing depended on building repeatable, effective development processes that focused on continuous improvement.

"We were keen to improve our own productivity levels, and we were also keen to expose ourselves to some level of international benchmarking to see how we did stack up, and where holes and opportunities for improvement were," explains Ashley Mahar, director of business development Geometry. "We had investigated things like ISO certification, but most were generic process certifications. We didn't feel like committing the resources involved to come up with a generic qualification to hang on our wall."

As in most SME development organizations, however, process change and eventual certification had proved to be far too expensive and complex an exercise given the company's natural financial and resource limitations. When the group learned about Software Engineering Australia's developing SoftwareMark program, however, it seized the opportunity to take a page out of industry best practice.

The effort was a major undertaking for the company, with the entire team mobilized to find and remedy process inefficiencies that had become endemic within many of Geometry's business activities. Over the course of more than eight months, the team gradually documented, audited, and improved its operations with the ever-present goal of providing more predictable, effective products for customers.

As a certification target, SoftwareMark proved to be remarkably broad, with coverage spreading from project management, quantification, and quoting of projects, breaking down work to ensure on-time delivery and avoidance of cost overruns. Many areas--such as corporate governance and financial management--are addressed even though they have little to do with the day-to-day development process. Across the board, business objectives are linked to project performance--something that Mahar says was lacking in the past.

SoftwareMark certification has improved project performance tracking and business metrics, giving Geometry the confidence to pursue larger projects knowing that it has the processes in place to successfully cost and deliver the projects it promises. The resources Geometry has invested in SoftwareMark certification have, he continues, delivered very real benefits in terms of increased business and a better customer experience. And that, in the end, translates into long-term business growth.

"Small companies don't always have the breadth of customer base that exposes them to a lot of best practice," says Mahar. "You tend to stick to a small circle of customers. But I don't think there's any doubt that one could look at one substantial tender, at least, that we would have probably struggled to get had we continued in our old style. We've always been able to produce good systems, but we can produce them repetitively now. There's an atmosphere of calm and control in the company that wasn't as pervasive before."