TABLE OF CONTENTS The term senior manager was defined in Chapter 4 as a management role at a high enough level in an organization that the primary focus of the senior manager is the long-term health and success of the organization rather than the short-term project and contractual concerns and pressures.
The senior manager normally establishes the business objectives and ensures that his vision is presented to and understood by all levels of management and practitioners. Together with the authority to establish the business objectives and sharing his vision with the organization, comes the responsibility of caring for the profit and loss of the organization.
Senior management is responsible for defining policy in line with the vision and business objectives. As previously defined, a policy is a "behavior expectation setting document" that describes how the organization's employees should go about their daily work. It makes the senior manager's expectations visible and provides high-level guidance for the development of more detailed processes, procedures, guidelines, templates, and checklists.
A senior manager has the authority to direct the allocation or reallocation of resources in support of the organization's process improvement initiative. This can involve the allocation of people, computers, telecommunications equipment, funding, training, and even physical space to groups or activities such as:
Systems/Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG);
Quality assurance group;
Integration and test group;
Configuration Management group that utilizes a CM tool such as PVCS or Clearcase.
Project managers and other responsible...
