The software development industry is plagued with bad practices even though so many of us know better. A HUGE portion of this problem is that to really start, and continue, working the way we know we should requires buy-in from our managers and coworkers. And it’s not just a conceptual buy in that we need. People need to really get the religion. But, you and I both know that we can’t realistically expect the rest of the company to change everything at once.

This flow chart addresses what I think are the three biggest changes we can make that will dramatically improve our companies. Find your biggest pain point and work on that. Once you’ve got that working really well in your group and you’re confident that people are going to stick with it you can choose the next biggest pain point and address that one, remembering what things worked best to get your employees to buy into the last change.

Each of the major pain points could easily get their own graph for implementing solutions at a similar level of complexity, but those are graphs for another day.

As always you can click on the image for a full sized version and / or download the Dia file too.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
\