Is management commitment a necessity after all in software process improvement?

Literature and practice has established that the lack of management commitment has been one of the top reasons for a failed SPI (software process improvement) initiative. This paper reports results from an ongoing study aimed at clarifying the role and the meaning of management commitment in SPI initiatives. Results from five focused interviews with SPI professionals are reported together with results from 12 SPI initiatives where the level of management commitment (in terms of concrete signs) was measured in order to test whether it would correlate with the level of success of an SPI initiative. In contrast with the evidence from the literature the results show that none of the signs of management commitment correlated significantly with the success of the SPI initiatives. it is suggested that the concept of champion may have explained the SPI project success better than management commitment. This paper concludes that many of the SPI initiatives do not require management commitment beyond obtaining the resources needed.