HP Testing Center of Excellence

Viewpoint paper

application quality and performance.

HP offers integrated software, services, and best practices to help companies make the move to the Center of Excellence (CoE) model quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively.

boost

Table of contents
CoE momentum .......................................................1 CoE evolution: An overview ......................................2 Key stages ..............................................................2 People, process, and product considerations ...............3 Making your move: Roles, processes, and deliverables ......................................................4 How to choose an implementation path .................... 11 HP Centers of Excellence services: Building an efficient CoE..................................................... 11 Summary: The rewards of CoE evolution ................... 12 For more information .............................................. 12 About the author: .................................................. 13

It takes a special kind of enterprise to compete in this world. It requires innovation to seize opportunity in a heartbeat and discipline to marshal its resources with efficiency and resolve. It takes an enterprise with agility that learns swiftly and continuously to close the expectation gap between what customers and citizens expect and what the enterprise can deliver. It takes an enterprise that isInstant-On.
Deploying and evolving a testing CoE enables organizations to improve application quality and performance in an organized way, at their own pace, while simultaneously cutting costs. It also provides greater visibility into the application life cycle and provides metrics for improving quality and performance in a rigorous, consistent, procedural way. This paper offers you practical, step-by-step advice for all phases of your journey, and demonstrates how HP is uniquely positioned as your business ally when implementing a testing CoE model. Improvement: Best practices in testing processes, organization, and artifacts can be collected from throughout the organization, standardized and improved, and then redistributed to the entire organization. This shortens the learning curve for new testing projects and improves the success of all testing teams. Alignment: The CoE model can help organizations synchronize business goals with IT priorities, resulting in better end-user services. Practicality: Building a CoE is an achievable goal. You can start on a small scale, leveraging existing resources, and expand its capabilities as the value is proven. Companies frequently find the CoE model to be self-funding. Career advancement: The CoE model creates a compelling new career opportunity for IT professionals, helping the organization recruit and retain top talent. Outsourcing/offshoring: A CoE can help ensure application quality and performance meets the same development standardsfor both in-house and outsourced applications. The key question for many CIOs today is not whether the CoE approach would benefit the organization, but rather how best to make the transition to the CoE model. The next section outlines the four key stages and their potential benefits; subsequent sections examine each stage in more detail.

CoE momentum
Organizations of all types and sizes are embracing the CoE model as a practical way to consistently and continually improve their IT operations. Industry analysts support the move to the CoE model. According to META Group, Clients focusing solely on day one of go-live rollout of applicationsat the expense of the long-term perspectivehave been increasingly disappointed in the results of their implementations ... To avoid such disappointment and gain continuous business improvement over the life cycle of an application installation (i.e., 20+ years), we recommend that clients create a CoE. Among the advantages of the CoE model for application delivery are the following: Efficiency: Application development/delivery products, best practices, and staff are integrated and made conveniently accessible to all project teams through one source, so there is no need to replicate expensive resources. In fact, total headcount could be reduced.

Figure, 1 A CoE is an organization focused on optimizing application characteristics such as quality, performance, or availability. It provides a management and automation platform for processes, consulting, and support services, as well as leadership and advocacy to help the organization optimize these attributes.

THE HP CENTER OF EXCELLENCE APPROACH NON-CoE APPROACH Project Team A Project Team B Project Team A

Role-Based Applications

Project Team B

Project Team C

Project Team D

Shared Processes and Expertise Project Team C Project Team D

Centralized Infrastructure

Exhibit 1 The CoE evolution features an organic evolution from addressing project issues to enterprise optimization.

KEY STAGES OF CoE EVOLUTION

Stage 1 PROJECT TESTING Stage 2 PRODUCT UTILITY Stage 3 SERVICE UTILITY Stage 4 QUALITY & PERFORMANCE AUTHORITY

ALIGN WITH THE BUSINESS GAIN CONTROL AND CREDIBILITY ACHIEVE OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE

CoE evolution: An overview

of interdependent contributors who all have a stake in the success of a particular application. And the One of the key advantages of the CoE is that it can be ecosystem can extend beyond your own company. built on a small scale initially, with minimal incremental Additional expertise with specific tools and expenditure, and you can evolve and scale up its technologies are all available through partners, resources, services, and capabilities iteratively as its suppliers, vendors, and even customer organizations. value is delivered to management, IT staff, and individual project teams. The CoE model can also be Key stages a critical asset for distributed organizations, providing HP, by working with thousands of customers, has centralized processes, infrastructure, and reporting. It found that CoEs typically go through an evolution is important to note that the value of the CoE is not limited to the IT department. Expertise, tools, and best with four stages, as depicted in Exhibit 1. No two practices relevant to application quality, performance, organizations have the same requirements, resources, or starting point for building a CoE; likewise, no two and availability are spread throughout the company: companies take identical paths in their evolution. R&D, lines of business (LOBs), IT operations, applications management, project managers, capacity However, the flexibility of the CoE model enables planners, and so forth. This is, in effect, an ecosystem companies to begin achieving tangible benefits almost immediately, and to reap even greater rewards as

they migrate to the next stage in a way that is most convenient and effective for their specific situation. Many companies still conduct little or no application testing before an application is moved to production. HP calls this Stage 0 and it is not shown on the preceding diagram. Sooner or later, companies that have not yet implemented any form of testing begin to experience firsthand the inherent risks associated with insufficient testing by having to roll back applications that were moved into production. Applications that arent sufficiently tested may cause problems through poor performance, low end-user productivity or, in the case of customer-facing applications, direct negative impact on company profitability and public perception. Eventually, project teams in different departments or LOBs are forced to improve the quality and performance of the delivered applications and begin formally testing. Stage 1 of the CoE model, the Project Testing phase, is the first step toward formalizing processesfor example, formally testing applications before they move into production. This stage, often undertaken at the departmental or LOB level, helps improve application quality and performance while also reducing the total costs for specific projects. The cost of correcting application faults found in production has been well documented to be many times the cost of fixing them earlier in the cycle. The savings in moving to this stage can be easily projected and quantified. It can also help organizations begin documenting the costs of specific quality or performance problems so that the benefits of the solution can be quantified.

The last step, Stage 4, is the transformation of the CoE to a Quality Authority, in which the CoE becomes a routine operation, contributing to an organizational culture focused on application excellence. Under the Authority model, no application makes it to production without going through consistent quality and performance processes and meeting agreed-upon quality standards. Once established, Quality and Performance Authorities (and even Service Utilities) can even compete against third-party outsourcers since they have the expertise and track record that no outside vendor can match. The Quality and Performance Authority can also control delivery by the third-party outsourcers in terms of quality and performance before it reaches the organization.

People, process, and product considerations

Wherever your company is on its path to implementing the CoE model, it is imperative to evaluate people, process, and product considerations before taking the next step forward. People: The CoE should collect and package any best practices relevant to the services it provides both internally and externally. In some cases, you may need to upgrade existing knowledge or even bring in totally new skill sets. Because of this, ensuring smooth, efficient knowledge transfer between employees and among cross-LOB project teams will be critical. Further, utilizing outside experts for organizational design, training, and mentoring may be required. For example, advanced services such as J2EE optimization or standards creation are specific skills that are frequently not available within an IT organization.

In the Project Testing phase, though, project teams in different departments or LOBs find themselves constantly reinventing the wheelwasting time, Process: When you apply industry best practices, money, and IT talentand generating an ever-growing you can create world-class processes. Ensuring assortment of incompatible tools and inconsistent consistent processes built from a high level of practices. The move to the next stage is really the expertise within your projects will result in more of first step toward implementing centralized and them completing successfully in less time for less standardized testing capabilities. This Product Utility money. At the same time, you need to maintain model, where a centralized product is available as a the flexibility to adapt your approach and your shared service, is shown as Stage 2. Leveraging this capabilities to different project frameworks and model, LOBs can increase the ROI of their technology organizational cultures. infrastructure by consolidating hardware, software, Product: Robust infrastructure and automation and learning costs. platforms are essential to success of the CoE. One The next step in the evolution, Stage 3, is called the of the primary goals will be to eliminate piecemeal Service Utility model, in which the CoE becomes a tools and incompatible platforms among various central source of services and expertise to improve project teams. By standardizing on industry-leading, quality and performance. Typically, testing projects state-of-the-art testing products, your company can are limited in their knowledge and use of industry best accelerate time to market and realize significant practices and processes; even if theyre experts in tangible savings at the same time. Standardized CoE their area, maintaining that expertise at an LOB level products can also help your organization maintain is simply not efficient. With the CoE model, a broad superior efficiency of delivered services; automate range of project groups have access to the experience processes to ensure consistency and repeatability; and recommendations of experts. and gain control and visibility into CoE activities.

Making your move: Roles, processes, and deliverables

The discussion so far has centered on CoE basics: how a CoE works, benefits it can deliver, and considerations for building a CoE strategy. This section Youre ready to transition to Stage 1 if you have: provides a more detailed look at the four stages of Applications with poor quality or notably sluggish CoE evolution and the incremental benefits of moving performance from one stage to the next. Applications that are consistently late to market and Moving from Stage 0 to Stage 1 over budget Your company is at Stage 0 if it has not yet Testing resources that are not used efficiently implemented any formalized testing processes. If youre at Stage 0, youre far from alone; many Benefits to expect organizations large enough to have an IT department Increases in the quality, performance, and have not yet begun significant formalized testing of availability of business systems even their most critical applications. Reductions in high-impact outages You begin the transition to Stage 1 by choosing to Reduced time to bring an application to production, implement formalized testing. Many corporations increasing your ability to comply with regulatory have made this choice, and there are many resources agencies/requirements to assist you. Often, companies prefer to start with Protection of current revenues by minimizing risks applications that are important to the business but not and impact on current operations the most critical applications; this approach enables the organization to gain some experience before New roles addressing mission-critical applications. You may Test automation expert also consider starting with critical applications that New skill sets might be required of the existing apparently did not go through any testing before development team. Typically, a QA team is created where any testing will be an improvement. to implement defect tracking, test management The second step is to identify the team that will be responsible for implementing the testing processes. Typically, this will be a standard QA team, led by a QA manager/director who reports to the applications team or a QA organization. Alternatively, you may wish to establish a team that will implement processes for specific projects or use one of the project testing teams. The Project Testing stage usually involves managing the testing process and automating some aspects of application testing. Automation is the key to improving the speed, accuracy, and flexibility of the testing process, and can give companies the ability to find and fix more defects earlier. Some companies may need to hire or bring in an automation expert at this stage. From a product perspective, the move to Stage 1 involves selecting and deploying testing applications. For example, many organizations choose to begin their project testing implementation with defect management because it is very easy to show value practically from the first projects. Additionally, test automation typically delivers an ROI for any application that has a significant life cyclethat is, any important application. These steps require the deployment of a product such as HP TestDirector for processes, requirements management processes, functional and regression test automation, and performance validation processes. New processes Requirements management Test management Test automation Defect tracking Deliverables Test plans Structured testing processes in selected projects Test automation infrastructure Performance and quality baselines for projects Project teams skilled in quality and performance management Case studies of successful IT projects in terms of delivered quality Products HP Quality Center HP QuickTest Professional HP Performance Center HP LoadRunner

defect tracking and management of other aspects of the testing process, and HP Quick Test Professional, which provides functional and regression test automation for practically every software application and environment.

Services HP Functional Testing Services HP Performance Testing Services Challenges The move from Stage 0 to Stage 1 involves cultural change as well as new skill sets. Project team members must understand and accept the need to change old habits, try new tools and techniques, measure and report results more rigorously and consistently, and work together across the full development life cycle. Project plans should account for the new processes and associated activities. Practical advice Start with processes that are high impact, such as defect management, and use your success to prove the value of the model and secure support for additional projects. Focus initially on the projects with high visibility where fear of failure is high. Position the move to Stage 1 as an incremental changea natural evolutionrather than a broad organizational change. Internal selling is essential. You will need to have executive support; you will need to communicate and prove the value of testing throughout your organization.
Moving from Stage 1 to Stage 2

Case Study: Manulife Financial

For Manulife to maintain its competitive advantage, the workflow application must perform. Manulife is a show-me type of organization, and HPs testing solutions consistently show their value. LoadRunner was the only software solution that did not require us to tweak the applications or make changes to the back-end systems and database before running a load test. Other groups have liked our results ... HP has definitely made a big impression on our entire IT group.
Mike Lydan, project director

Manulife Financial is a leading Canadian-based financial services company operating in 15 countries and territories. In its Insurance Services division, fast applications delivering accurate data are important the average transaction exceeds $1 million. The IT group was ready to deploy a Siebel upgrade, and then applied LoadRunner for the first time. It failed, but using LoadRunners performance monitors, the technical team was able to isolate performance bottlenecks at the transaction level and correct problems without jeopardizing business.

After your organization has experienced success implementing structured testing processes and test automation, there will be a natural inclination to replicate those successes on additional projects. Other development teams will begin to test their applications; it is likely they will go through the same processes of choosing testing applications, learning new processes, and creating new approaches to improving application quality. They will likely run into many of the same problems and learn the hard way how to solve them. A more effective approach is to create a CoE and make a core set of standardized tools available to all developers and testing teams. At this stage and subsequent stages, the technology/platform is physically centralized, but access is decentralized to serve team members who are not physically in the same location (such as distributed development or outsourcing environments). The inefficiencies of the piecemeal approach to product procurement, operation, and usage will become more obvious, and the benefits of a Product Utility will be more clearly apparent.

In the Product Utility model, testing applications are centrally installed and centrally managed to ensure 24x7 availability for all development teams. Individual development and testing groups have access to these tools as a service provided by the Product Utility. The products are available as reliably as electricity is, hence the term Product Utility. This stage is the first time that youve actually centralized resources, and it is at this point that you will need to create a central CoE team. This team is led by the manager of the CoE, who is responsible for the overall success of the CoE. This individual ideally should have at least two years experience with the companys IT organization, as well as a general business background. In addition, the CoE will need a product administrator, who will be responsible for technical functions such as applying patches, adding new users and privileges, backing up databases, etc.

The CoE may also require an infrastructure administrator to keep key hardware and software elements up and running, and a customer support representative to address specific problems. These two employees may be part of a Shared Services organization to help keep costs low, or they may be hired directly into the CoE organization if there is sufficient need. Youre ready to transition to Stage 2 when: Youve achieved successful results with several projects in Stage 1, Project Testing. Youve demonstrated tangible benefits to management and received their support. There are piecemeal tools and resources used by individual project teams. There is fragmented responsibility for quality management/performance optimization. Benefits to expect More efficient use of a smaller set of tools Reduced IT cost through elimination of multiple/ redundant products and infrastructure Reduced IT costs through elimination of duplicate hardware environments Higher ROI from the tools on which your organization standardizes Faster time-to-market due to less time spent learning numerous products New roles CoE manager Product administrator Infrastructure administrator Customer support representative Processes Center management: charge-back, project communication, demand management Administration: product and infrastructure Deliverables 24x7 enterprise-wide availability of the testing applications Product support Centralized resource scheduling and license management Product Utility service-level reporting Basic cross-project performance reporting Product Utility marketing within the organization

Products HP Performance Center HP Quality Center, including the HP Application Delivery Dashboard and HP Business Process Testing HP Demand Management Services HP Quality Center Implementation Service HP Performance Center Implementation Service Strategy and planning Product implementation Center administration Product Utility organizational design Product operational training and mentoring Demand Management implementation Functional Test Automation implementation (Optional) Software-as-a-Service for HP tools infrastructure management Challenges This is the first time the organization actually centralizes anything, so this is the point at which individual teams are first asked to give up some measure of control and use a central service, which can be a difficult organizational change. In some cases, additional training/mentoring may be required for certain individuals. Practical advice You can help alleviate any resentment that may occur by emphasizing the personal and professional benefits of adopting the new tools and the CoE model. For example, point out that standardizing on one toolset makes it possible to collect and use specific metrics in a consistent way, making it easier for QA professionals not only to do their jobs better but also to share information and results with other project teams. Also point out the frustrations of traditional nonprocedural development and testing processesthe inability to reconstruct what other team members have done when theyre absent or leave the company, the delays caused by inconsistent use of tools or incompatible products, and so on. In addition, emphasize that mastering industry-standard tools and procedures will help advance their skill base and their potential for career advancement. Assign a champion to drive the transition to Stage 2 proactively (ideally this should be a CoE manager). Since this is the first actual centralization effort, this transition will require a higher level of executive buy-in and management support. Dont be shy about showing off successes and accomplishments.

 Educate your organization, evangelize IT management, and create workshops for the decision-makers. Dont dictate that chosen testing applications are required to be used on every project. Offer services that provide value to the individual project teams so they choose to use the central service. For example, for the initial projects, provide them access to the testing applications for no charge, or offer to help conduct performance testing during nonproduction hours. Alternatively, ensure the central group makes the testing application always available, applies software patches, backs up test assets, and so forth.
Moving from Stage 2 to Stage 3

Case Study: Hershey Foods

We built our testing strategy around TestDirector and HP Testing Services because theres simply nothing else like it on the market today. We have a complete project methodology that dictates proper testing procedures, and TestDirector is an integral part of that. Its the home for our tests and the place people go to run their tests; report and validate their results; provide statistics; and track issues.
Art Murray, manager of Applications Testing, Hershey Foods Corporation

After youve successfully implemented the Product Utility model and centralized quality and performance testing applications, youll likely want to do the same thing with expertise and certain testing activities. HP refers to this stage as the Service Utility, where in addition to the availability of the testing applications, value-added services are delivered by the central group. The Service Utility provides centralized personnel who can offer QA teams expertise and advice on how best to take advantage of the standardized products or processes. The Service Utility can help projects improve quality and performance by collecting testing best practices and distributing them throughout the organization; training and mentoring project teams; providing testing services across multiple LOBs; helping build testing processes such as defect tracking, test planning, and results analysis; and providing a dashboard with visibility into project status, and more. Service Utility expertise can also be outsourced as its experience and expertise matures. The Service Utility involves the addition of a few new roles, such as performance experts, test automation experts, test engineers, technical architects, and data engineers the people who have best-practice expertise and advanced technical knowledge. These people play a vital role in advising, training, and mentoring individual project teams across departments and LOBs, and they ensure consistency in the application of best practices across the application life cycle. The Service Utility team can also provide hands-on assistance with the toughest projects or projects that are in distress. They offer a level of expertise that no individual project teams can match, and they have the experience to troubleshoot and remedy issues that are creating delays or budget overruns immediately.

Hershey Foods set out to upgrade its Enterprise SAP system and verify that functionality is consistent with earlier versions, including 150 touch points with 35 integrated applications. The project team was made up of project managers, businesses analysts, and developers from around the world2,400 defects were found and corrected. The Hersheys project team used TestDirector to establish a new, standardized release strategy that will enable more projects to be completed with fewer problems.

Youre ready to transition to stage 3 when: The benefits of the Product Utility have been proven to management. There is inconsistent application of practices across application life cycle stages. QA teams have experienced the benefits of centralizing product resources and are ready to extend the model to best practices. There is a lack of skilled resources in the project teams. Benefits to expect Quality and performance benefits are extended to more and more applications across the organization. Reliable, high quality, inexpensive testing services drive higher quality and performance. Unexpected departures of highly skilled individuals no longer cripple key projects. The CoE becomes more and more highly regarded internally, creating an upward spiral in its value and effectiveness for the organization. Project costs continue to decline while time to market continues to improve.

New roles Project manager Service coordinator Technical architect Performance engineers Test engineer Test environment manager Data engineer Processes Center management: enhanced demand management and resource management Test project management Requirements management Test management Defect management Functional test planning, development, and execution Functional test automation Performance validation Performance optimization Deliverables Structured automated testing processes Performance validation and optimization Training and mentoring Knowledge management Advanced cross-project performance reporting Service-level reporting Service marketing

Products Any required product options (HP Monitoring and Diagnostics for J2EE, HP Deep Diagnostics, or additional protocols, for example) Services Service Utility organizational design Knowledge management Pilot projects Extended performance processes Project management Internal marketing processes HP Managed Services and Assured Deployment Challenges The transition to the Service Utility may require some individuals to discontinue techniques and practices theyre familiar and comfortable with, possibly leading to resentment. As your organization becomes more standardized and centralized, costs are shifted to the central group (such as recruiting and hiring people to fill the new roles). While the overall costs of project delivery are reduced, this can be difficult for senior management to accept unless they clearly understand the charter and the benefits of the CoE. In some cases, the very success of the CoE can create a challenge. As the CoE gains a reputation as the destination for the best and brightest engineers within the company, others can begin to feel like second-class citizens. Competition may occur with third parties already providing services to the organization.

Practical Advice As the reputation of the CoE grows, it becomes easier to convince executives that the investment is paying off. Make sure the successes of the Product Utility phase are strongly communicated among QA engineers throughout the company. At the same time, make sure all QA teams throughout the company understand that the CoE is there to help them, not replace them. Offer advanced classes on testing techniques to increase the skills of QA teams. Achieve successes with a few projects before organizational rollout. Create a best practice repository and continually update it. Proactively distribute best practices to development and QA teams. Create standardized templates for project initiation, test requirements, test plans, and so forth. Continue to evangelize the successes of the CoE. Make sure the CoE manager is visible to the application development leadership.
Moving from Stage 3 to Stage 4

Once youve made the transition to Stage 4, you have enough metrics, enough consistency, and enough of a track record to greatly simplify the process of justifying the existence of the CoEanecdotally as well as financially. You have implemented standardized services and metrics based on best practices; you have achieved real-time visibility and end-to-end traceability; you have true knowledge and expertise sharing; you have centralized management and authority. And you have successfully extended the ROI benefits of Stages 2 and 3 to the enterprise. From a personnel standpoint, the Authority model adds a Standards Group and a Methodology Group, so you will need to identify and recruit experts in those roles. You may also need to hire a technical writer at this point, as well as a compliance officer who can specify what the process is for complying with the specified QA and development processes and audit the compliance. Youre ready to transition to Stage 4 when: The concept of centralized, standardized tools and practices has been proven to upper-level management by the success of the Product Utility and Service Utility stages. Your organization is facing difficult compliance issues or tight compliance deadlines, such as Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. You want to ensure all applications follow a standardized quality process and meet agreed-upon requirements before promoting to production.

The move from the Service Utility to the Quality or Performance Authority is essentially a means of institutionalizing the tools, techniques, and practices of the CoE. This is now simply the way applications are developed, tested, and delivered, enterprise-wide. Once quality standards are created, the CoE begins to focus on processes outside of QA that influence application quality. For example, the CoE team may influence the development methodology to address quality issues earlier in the development cycle.

Benefits to expect Extension of the ROI benefits of Stages 2 and 3 to the entire enterprise Plentiful and precise metrics that help pinpoint quality and performance issues An efficient, holistic organization that not only addresses quality and performance problems but actually helps prevent problems before they arise A true testing community that shares ideas, advice, and knowledge A cost-effective, virtually self-funding organization New roles Standards and methodology groups Manager Process architect Process specialist Technical writer Compliance auditor Processes End-to-end quality and performance engineering Standards enforcement Formalized process improvement Deliverables Organizational and performance standards Expert quality and performance services Advanced training and mentoring Organizational knowledge management Organizational performance reporting Organizational education Products IT governance for cross-organizational process automation

Services Tight integration of Quality/Performance Authority into organization Quality/Performance Authority organization design Process management Standards and methodology management Process improvement process IT governance workflow Challenges No individual project groups have authority to change testing processes. Pockets of untapped expertise exist within project groups. As in any environment that is rich in processes, you need to ensure processes are not over-engineered. Practical advice While the goal is to standardize processes and practices to ensure lowest cost and the highest efficiency, you need to be easy to do business with. This means flexibility to adopt your approach and your capabilities to the customers project framework and even culture. This flexibility has well-defined limits at this stage. The power of the Quality or Performance Authority should be its ability to help the organization manage the transition to the new standards. Measure your achievements. This is important for controlling the value of the CoE and also proving the value to the outside world. You need to provide your customers with high visibility into your progress, status, and findings. Maintain hands-on experience by providing expert services. It is easy to be perceived as overhead process police if you do not deliver actual assistance to the organization. Go beyond the boundaries of the testing process to create quality awareness.

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How to choose an implementation path

When choosing this initial project, we again recommend you work with a trusted adviser who Planning the implementation of your CoE isnt a small can help guide the specific project with the end task. Because there is organizational change involved, vision in mind. In addition to fully testing the there are many aspects that need to be considered. specific application that you choose, be sure to Fortunately, you can take an incremental approach to create the appropriate organizational structure and implementing your CoE. Companies that are successful processes that will enable you to address additional implementing a CoE always focus on specific problems applications. Ensure your team becomes selfthat need to be solved. The CoE addresses those sufficient in the usage of the testing applications and problems and, in so doing, provides value either especially in the new processes that are created. through reduced cost or improved time to market that When first implementing a CoE, look for ways to can be used to justify further investments in the CoE. reduce risks. Two risks that are easily overcome are those associated with knowledge transfer and with Typically, the most difficult stage to implement is the the administration of the testing applications. HP first, whatever you may choose that to be. There are Managed Services can dramatically reduce these a number of items that need to be addressed: finding risks while at the same time reducing the total cost of a champion in the development and QA groups; ownership of the CoE platform. communicating to management the long-term vision and value of the Center; finding the appropriate HP Centers of Excellence services: funding model; overcoming organizational resistance to change; building new skill sets; and others. Building an efficient CoE To ensure your success in the initial step toward a CoE, make sure you work with a source who has proven its ability to deliver a CoE. Depending on your specific situation, you may want help crafting a strategic plan that specifies how your CoE will evolve over time. Regardless of whether you use outside resources to create this plan, make sure that it is in place before addressing your first project. Your first project may help you move from one stage to the next; you may even choose to skip a stage in the model described above. HP offers integrated software, services, and best practices to help companies make the move to the CoE model quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively. HP Optimization Centers are used to optimizing application quality, performance, availability, and problem resolution, while managing IT projects, their costs, and compliance. HP Optimization Centers enable IT functional teams to work in a centralized, automated fashionsaving time, cutting costs, and increasing the effectiveness of critical IT activities. In addition, HP Managed Services provide you with a preinstalled and managed CoE platform, together with mentoring and coaching services supporting your move to the CoE model.

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Summary: The rewards of CoE evolution

The CoE model has already proven its value at hundreds of companies worldwide. The CoE is an efficient change agent, driving optimization in the organization. Individual initiatives or per-project attempts to achieve better quality typically have a very limited organizational impactand there are often major roadblocks to implementing them. Deploying and evolving a CoE enables organizations to improve application quality and performance in an organized way, at their own pace, while simultaneously cutting costs. It provides greater visibility into the application life cycle and provides metrics for improving quality and performance in a rigorous, consistent, procedural way. And it appeals to both engineers and managers, offering a compelling new alternative for skill development and career advancement.

Case Study: NASDAQ

HP testing tools and services have given us a way to provide consistency throughout the organization, regardless of the application being tested, the kind of test being run, or the testing modemanual or automatedwe choose. The result is tighter control, better access to test information, and a lot more reuse of test information over time.
Eric Henry, associate director of Test Management NASDAQ

The NASDAQ Stock Market is the largest electronic stock market in the world, trading more shares per day than all other U.S. exchanges combined. NASDAQ systems handle up to $17.7 billion in trades per day, which translates into approximately 647 million shares daily. To improve efficiency and accuracy, and to reduce development costs in this massive, diversified environment, The NASDAQ has begun a long-term program to revise its enterprise-wide application testing environment. HP was selected to provide the overall testing methodology and architecture in which all testing will take place.

For more information

To learn more about HP CoE offerings, visit
http://www.hp.com/services/qualityfactory

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About the author

Bob Politi

Bob Politi is the HP U.S. Solution leader for the SAP Enterprise Application Services practice. As the Practice leader, he is responsible for the ERP sustain delivery for multiple U.S. clients within the SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel, J.D. Edwards product base. He is directly involved with our client base assisting with the solution design and implementation of global ERP sustain solutions. As these solutions are implemented, Politi continues to assist our ERP clients with the future growth of their ERP footprint and associated bolt-on software to ensure global sustain services are aligned to our clients business. He has over 20 years of HP experience, the last 14 years involved with the global ERP programs that involve program management, consulting, implementations, and global sustain programs. Politi has guided our client base through business process improvements, consolidations, system transitions, and new platform architecture.

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Copyright 2011 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. 4AA3-3058ENW, Created April 2011