The Story behind the TPI® NEXT cover.
Dec04
A couple of weeks ago, Sogeti published the new version of TPI®, TPI ® NEXT. Reinder Otter wrote a summary on his blog about it. And if you want to know more about the new TPI read the information on http://tpinext .com.
In this post I want to explain the meaning of the cover, as I designed it. This cover is not only just a funny picture but was designed it with some thoughts in mind.
Upwards arrows on the background
TPI is about Test Process Improvement. Most of the time people have the goal to improve their process more and more. It depends on the type of organisation or development process you’re in. But what you try is to improve on the different key areas as mentioned in TPI. The goal of this is to be more effective and efficient.
The upwards arrows symbolise the improvement of the process. You can start this process very small for some specific key areas. This progress will go wider and wider, you have to improve more and more key areas. You can see this in the small starting point of the arrow and the wide end of the arrow.
White circles in the image
Test process improvement is always an interaction between the business/people (that are doing the job) and the test consultant. A test consultant can bring in knowledge and experience of other organisations to improve particular test processes. But without the interaction with the customer the improvement will be a theoretical improvement with a nice report with without any real improvement in the way people are doing their work.
The two white circles on the cover are those two parties they are connected to each other by the two curved white arrows. These two parties influence each other during the assessments and during the improvement of the organization.
White curved arrows
These two curved arrows have two functions. The first is the ever during interaction between the expert and the organization. This is needed to do the things right that fits for each specific organization. The second meaning of these curved arrows is the communication between the two parties. Without a clear and understanding communication you can produce a report with improvement suggestions but nobody will use them.
The small colored squares
To improve the test process you can cluster the key areas. If you`re using the business driven aspect of TPI® NEXT you can cluster the areas in a certain way it fits to your idea of improving the process.
Each of these squares symbolized a key area, the different colors of the squares symbolize the different clusters.
3 small white arrows
The last element in the image are the three small arrows. These three small arrows point to the right, because the model of TPI has the lower levels on the left side and the highest one (optimising) on the right side. If you want to improve you have to go to the right side in the model. (n.b. there are 4 levels, you get the first one for free this is the initial level, from the controlled level you can go to the efficient and to the optimized level).
These 3 arrows are together 1 arrow. Each small arrow symbolized a main part of the TPI® NEXT model. These main parts are: the key areas, maturity levels and the check points. Together with the improvements suggestions and the enablers is this the model (somebody suggest that the blue arrow, in the three white arrows, is the opposition of the organization you can feel during improvement. That‘s wasn’t my idea but I think there is always some opposition).
Colors,
I didn’t have any intentions with the colors blue white and gray. In the initial version I had also a green color. I can make a fantasy about these colors but there is now story behind this.
If you have any suggestions or your own thoughts about the cover, please leave a comment. Maybe we can write a new book about the image of the cover of a new book 
December 4th, 2009 at 08:53
No problems at all with the “Capgemini blue” color! Nice, clean and understandable cover. Way different from the first TPI book (what was that all about?). What I do wonder about is the “3 small white arrows” which looks a lot like the triangle from the TPI NEXT book?
December 4th, 2009 at 08:58
I guess you mean the TMap Next logo? They are not the same, shame on you
in that triangle are just two arrows and a parallelogram!
September 4th, 2010 at 00:02