Information Technology (IT) is inextricably tied to financial services; the business can no longer view IT as simply a part of discretionary spending. More particular to the financial services industry, technology is a way to gain competitive advantage through innovation. Financial services companies discover ways to utilize technology in order to generate product and process innovation, for example, consider the innovation to use scanners and, more recently, smart phones to deposit checks from home or elsewhere instead of with an ATM or a teller at a brick and mortar bank. As the market becomes more competitive, financial services companies must rely even more on product and process innovation. A key enabler of this innovation is the ability to fully understand the current state of how business value is delivered through the use of IT. This understanding can in turn help financial services companies to plan more effectively both strategically and tactically as the environmental factors change constantly. As companies spend vast amounts of money on projects, it is imperative to understand how ideas flow through a life cycle and are ultimately realized by some process or product offering that in turn deliver some value to the business. The goal of IT for the business is often stated as an improvement in triumvirate: better, faster, cheaper. The difficulty with this goal is that these facets are often mutually exclusive. How then, can IT deliver? This thesis will examine how one financial services company may improve its software project delivery process by examining its historical and current operating state and then discussing some recommendations to achieve improvement. / text

Software process improvement (SPI) is generally associated with large organizations. Large organizations have the possibilities to fund software process improvement programs as large scale activities. Often these improvement programs do not show progress until some time has elapsed. The Capability Maturity Model can take one year to implement and not until then can measures be made to see how much quality increased. Small organizations do not have the same funding opportunities but are still in need of software process improvement programs. Generally it is better to initiate a software process improvement program as early as possible, no matter what size of organization. Although the funding capabilities for small organizations are less compared to large organizations, the total required funding will still be smaller than in large organizations. The small organization will grow and overtime become a midsized or large organization, so by starting an improvement program at an early stage the funding overall should be minimized. This becomes more visible when the organization has grown large. This master thesis presents the idea of implementing a software process improvement program, or at least parts of it, by evaluating the software project. By evaluating a project the specific needs that are most critical are implemented in the next project. This process is iterated for each concluded project. The master thesis introduces the Iterating Evaluation Model based on an interview survey. This model is compared to an already existing model, the Experience Factory.