What are RPI's strengths?

The RPI Methodology has several strengths over other improvement approaches. Here are some of the essential strengths.

1. RPI focuses on achieving real and meaningful business goals and fixing product development problem, rather than on passing a maturity level rating
2. RPI implements managed incremental improvements
3. RPI is conducted using rapid improvement iterations
4. RPI uses modern facilitation techniques to rapidly model existing practices with minimal manpower and effort, while maintaining high involvement and buy-in among stakeholders
5. RPI uses proven operational modeling notations as the basis for documenting and improving software processes
6. RPI modeling activities capture information about how standard and unique existing practices are across projects
7. RPI can be used to improve any process that a reference process can be written for (e.g., TPI, ISO 9001, SPICE, Fagan-style inspections).

The features built into the RPI method are based on decades of successful techniques designed specifically to address many common problems with making successful change happen. These include the following.

1. Planning and measuring the performance results of improvement made from the very beginning of the change effort
2. Focusing on behavioral change rather than on process documentation
3. Shortening the cycle time of the changes made
4. Managing changes to improvement scope, requirements, constraints and resources in a disciplined fashion
5. Aligning measurements collected to specific business goals or problem