The responsibility for facilitating and managing the organization's process improvement activities is normally assigned to a process group. Figure 5.1 shows a sample process improvement infrastructure needed by an organization for successful process improvement along with the relative position of the process group (i.e., SEPG). This process group is normally seen as the focal group for action planning, process improvement, technology insertion, training, and awareness and expectation setting. Process groups are frequently viewed as a channel for institutionalizing the organization's knowledge of process methods, practices, and technology. Process groups are the organization's champion of change and its members are change agents.

Figure 5.1: Sample process improvement infrastructure.

Collectively the members of the process group need to be able to demonstrate their ability to manage, develop, coach, and guide process improvement and its accompanying cultural changes. First and foremost, they need to understand senior management's vision and the organization's business objectives to be able to efficiently and effectively guide the process improvement effort. Without this explicit knowledge, the organization's process improvement effort may demonstrate compliance to a model such as CMMI but not be supportive of the organization's business objectives at all.