Nowadays, organizations need to respond to customer demands with quality products and services. Methodologies and process models have been developed to help organizations to achieve these objectives. However, despite the efforts of organizations, they still come up against difficulties in their deployment and the processes are not institutionalized. Difficulty in process institutionalization arises due to the fact that most of these efforts focus on technical issues, and people issues are ignored. This paper presents the critical success factors to take into account in the process deployment, and a process deployment method to be used in software projects. These highlight the importance of having an effective process deployment strategy to adopt, use and institutionalize the process. The results of a case study are included. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.