Task: Prepare Reuse Adoption and Incentive Plan
Create a plan for practitioners and technical management to adopt reuse practices.
Disciplines: Asset Governance
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      Outputs
        Main Description

        Incentive Plan

        Creating a reuse incentive plan is critical to the success of asset-based development. There are multiple models that have been applied. A good treatment of this subject is found in the article by Robert G. Fichman (Boston College) titled: Incentive Compatibility and Systematic Software Reuse. (Appeared in: Journal of Systems and Software, New York; Apr 27, 2001; Vol. 57, Iss. 1; pg. 45.)

        Reuse Adoption

        Reuse adoption is a significant issue for the enterprise. An enterprise can do all the right things for the technical environment, and have the management support. However, adoption and rollout into the enterprise is where many enterprises fail with assets. Best practice shows us that for the asset adoption to have a better chance of survival, a mixed model is required.

        This means that the asset program must have top-down management support, and that the rollout of the asset program must be bottom-up. The reuse program generally requires bottom-up successes where it has been proven by early adopting projects in the enterprise. This may mean the rollout is slower, but the overall success tends to be greater.

        There is less chance of success if the adoption strategy is an enterprise-wide, top-down forced usage model. The adoption strategy should be aligned closely with the efforts to capture and measure the successes and failures of the reuse efforts.

        The real challenge is to manage organizational and cultural change, and this takes time to be proven and adopted.

        Steps
        Evaluate the Asset-Based Governance and Development Workflows

        The organization structure for applying asset-based development can create incentives for reuse, just as it may also create dis-incentives. The top-down strategy must provide for repository structure and governance. However, the bottom-up adoption of the repository is critical.

        Measuring repository participation is one level of incentive for practitioners. Another form of incentive is budgetary impact for project leads to use the asset repository.

        Create Reuse Adoption and Incentive Plan

        With the organizational structure aligned to support the active participation of asset producers with the asset consumers, both in terms of understanding their needs as well as supporting the assets, a plan can be written.

        The reuse adoption and incentive plan should describe:

        • How asset support and training will be provided by asset manufacturing teams to the asset consumers
        • How asset production will be performed only with the participation of asset consumer input and with the active involvement of asset producers
        • How repository submissions and asset approvals are governed, to reduce the chance of waste in the repository
        • How the successful use of assets will be communicated to the organization
        • How financial benefits will be applied to projects and communities using assets