A team-based process improvement initiative

Summary form only given. The Information Technology Institute (ITI) thrives on a research and development environment that is similar to many applied research institutes in the United States. It delivers projects that apply advanced and useful high technologies to difficult problems. Most of these projects have a fixed deadline, be it a launch date or a deployment date. Hence, the process supporting these projects needs to be sensitive to the management of scope and resources. The improvement process started in 1992, when ITI embarked on a journey to define an IS0 9000-compliant quality management system (QMS). I take a macro perspective towards deriving a process best suited to any environment. Instead of describing the processes that are in use in our organisation, I emphasise the participation of teams in the definition and deployment of the QMS.