Many organisations only recognise their pain and use painkillers without taking into account the adverse reactions in the healthy organs. It is the art of process assessment to provide the right diagnosis.

Either standards or maturity models are used as reference in assessments. There is an underlying assumption that these references define the state of the art and therefore an assessment using them provides a useful picture with hints what to keep as it is and where to change what. The development of such references and of the underlying models is a job with great responsibility. The first session is devoted to assessment.

With reliable assessment results at hand we need ‘only’ to implement the improvements in the identified areas. The only problem is ‘only’. Organisations have a great inertia, development organisations working on innovation for others the greatest. Therefore is the topic of approaches used for process improvement and experience / insights gained of prevalent interest. The second session provides some insights in this area.

The last session contains reports about work in progress. These present a variety of topics in the field and invite for discussion on the directions in the field.