Change Management: From Knowledge about Innovative SE to Capabilities for Industrial SE Projects

sd&m AG, software design & management, has the development and integration of custom built information systems for business critical processes as its area of business. IT consulting with engineering and implementation competence makes it complete. Our clients are major companies and organizations. They want to achieve a competitive edge by implementing custom built solutions. The core competence of the 1.600 person company is the design of IT architectures and the realization of complex projects in a cooperative way with clients. The overall key success factor is the qualification of the team. Continuously to manage is the growth including small acquisitions, the dynamic of technology and the increasing expectations of our clients. For our clients we are innovation partner. Our understanding is not to be the earliest possible adapter for the last hype but being able to differentiate between hype and future value. We use two sources for improvement: project experience and innovation management. Project experience: We have implemented continuous cycles of learning and improvement. project experiences and best practices are collected and evaluated by communities and sd&m Research, enriched by scientific methods together with universities. Best practices certified by our best software architects will be finished to excellent solutions and become part of our organized knowledge, can be distributed by our development platform as a solution pattern or component, influence our training schools, flow into publications and community work and sometimes result in a book. Announcement and distribution is one of the key success factors. Innovation management: Results of our innovation management are in a first phase knowledge with small experience about a new programming language or environment, a new integration product suite or a new way to design application systems and their successful integration into complex application landscapes. In the following phase we go to our market and challenge our clients view on concrete innovation examples. If we find their interest we identify together real small pilot projects. After project end together with the client we evaluate the results compared to what we expected. If it was valuable for one client we go back with our first capabilities and make to steps: (a) building a new community and (b) designing qualification methods. The community works on the topic of interest with more prototypes, cookbooks and infrastructure - we invest. The qualification methods have at least to outputs: how to integrate the content into the standard qualification activities and how to ramp up the experienced part of the team. For really important content in the domain of our core competence we implement so called schools. In every school we educate 20 - 30 software engineers in 4 to 5 days distributed over the whole company. The trainers come from the community. The life cycle of this school type is 1 - 2 years. then the content is established in the standard education. Parallel with the first projects starts the above describe improvement process by systematic evaluation of project experiences in the new arenas. On the other side we work on the design of the new service offering and bring it to the market. This works only with qualified colleagues. It's always the same: fighting for the first reference clients and projects. Effects where we were successful are for example net, SAP NetWeaver Technology and business intelligence solutions. First class qualified software engineers and architects are necessary, to keep this continuous change management alive with the objective to transfer knowledge into capabilities.