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Do’s and Don’ts of Process Improvement
Pat O'Toole
#1: DO Keep Your Eye on the Prize
Imagine that, six months ago, your senior management directed your Engineering Process Group (EPG) to achieve CMMI maturity level 2 within a year. As an EPG member, you have invested extensive (some might say “excessive”) time and effort generating all the required policies, procedures, templates, measures, checklists, and training materials, but you are now having trouble getting the development projects to pilot and adopt any of these new process components.
Being a reasonable, proactive change agent, you solicit your sponsor’s assistance. The sponsor eloquently reminds project personnel how important it is to reach maturity level 2 and urges them to be more open to helping the organization achieve this distinctive honor. The sponsor instructs the Process and Product Quality Assurance group to be more aggressive in explaining the value of all this new process stuff and in identifying process deviants. But nothing really changes; the process assets continue to gather dust and the EPG’s frustration continues to mount.
Sound familiar? Why are the projects being so difficult and how can the EPG achieve maturity level 2 if the projects don’t get with the program? Why aren’t the projects helping you to achieve success?
But wait a minute…why is the organization doing process improvement? You’re not REALLY doing it to “achieve maturity level 2,” you’re doing it to improve. You shouldn’t be forcing the projects to grunt through a pile of administrivia to accommodate the CMMI; you should be employing process aspirin to relieve project pain. Perhaps you can exploit the CMMI to help the projects achieve greater success!
Let’s check this hypothesis by determining which result is preferred:
- You are appraised maturity level 2, but the projects achieve no measurable improvement; or
- The projects achieve measurable improvement, but you never reach maturity level 2.
Unless there are compelling business reasons to get a particular CMMI maturity level (i.e., your customers will not allow you to bid on work unless you have been appraised at maturity level 2), answering “A” above means you’ve been in the Quality organization too long!
On the other hand, if the EPG continues to help the projects succeed, their value will be recognized and they will overcome much of the projects’ natural resistance to change. In addition, if the projects continue to demonstrate sustainable improvement, the CMMI maturity level will ultimately come. Remember that using the CMMI is merely one tactic to achieve a higher-level (no pun intended) business strategy through the execution of successful projects.
Consider keeping the EPG focused properly by changing the meaning of “SPI” from Software Process Improvement to Software Project Improvement and by establishing the EPG’s motto as: “If we are not helping the projects achieve measurable improvement, we are failing!”
Okay, so what is the higher-level business strategy? And how do you define project success? And what do you do with senior management’s directive to “achieve maturity level 2”? These issues will be addressed by the next installment, “Do: Establish the Alignment Principle”.