Most industries are challenging to increase productivity of software development. Often many process improvement activities are started with enthusiasm, unfortunately most of these are less successful than forecasted or improvements do not sustain for long. This paper presents the Seven Forces Improvement Method, SFIM, which claims to overcome unexpected disappointment in improvement results. SFIM is built upon different aspects that influence the success of software process improvements, such as culture, skills and organization. The method has been applied to improvement activities in a large software department for a number of years. The success of SFIM is compared with the compliance with the SFIM method. The paper shows that application of SFIM increases the success rate of software improvement activities in industry.