This paper reports on how the authors planned and conducted the work in the initial phase of software process improvement in a Norwegian software house. The work was motivated by the results from the projects SPIQ (Dybå, Wedde et al. 2000) and PROFIT (http://www.geomatikk.no/profit), where a pragmatic approach to software process improvement was the main focus. The way the work was conducted was further motivated by the results of Tore Dybå (Dybå 2001). He claimed that for instance participation of employees and exploitation of existing knowledge has positive influence on the success of software process improvement. This led us to arrange workshops with participants from all relevant parts of the organisation to gather a picture as broad as possible of the situation. The paper is organised as follows: First we describe the motivation behind the choice of method. Then we describe the case study. Then we discuss the results we got from our investigations. The paper ends with a conclusion and a description of further work.