Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are a great contribution to the international economy and have also been considered an important component in today�s world business. Thus, in order to be more competitive, it is necessary for these companies to deliver their products with high-quality. However, despite their importance, small software companies still face myriad challenges and barriers in producing high-quality products. The objective of this study is to identify the organizational factors that have a positive impact to enable Software Process Improvement (SPI) effort in the small software industry. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted to achieve the main objective of this study. The findings from this study provide a roadmap to guide future research in order to enable SPI effort in the small software development industry. We believe that findings from this study will give interesting insights to encourage researchers in using compromise technique to analyze future empirical studies based on a specific region to validate the suitability of identified factors in the specific country. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.