Interpretation and reporting of process capability results: focus on improvement

A global financial services company followed a software-mediated process assessment (SMPA) approach based on ISO/IEC 15504, ISO/IEC 20000 and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). Using an action research approach, the Incident Management, Problem Management, and Change Management processes were assessed at two points in time during an ITSM process improvement project. This paper analyzes the results of the process assessments, highlights issues with the interpretation of the results, and offers an alternative method to report process capability results to motivate process improvement. The study found that by using the proportion of SMPA recommendations as a proxy measure for process improvement, the processes did improve yielding fewer recommendations in cycle 2 when compared to cycle 1 of the action research