SPECIAL SECTIONS

Throughout the book, you ll find special sections that are designed to help you understand, retain, and use the information being imparted. Some special sections will also help you have some fun learning the information, while others will hopefully cause your mind to just wander off down its own path so you can make new discoveries and explore breakthrough ideas of your own. These special sections are described below.

Quiz: What Do You Think? What Do You Believe?

At the beginning of each chapter, there is a short quiz. I can t watch you use this book, so I don t know if you ll take the quiz or not, answer the questions honestly or cheat. However, I think if you just try one, you ll want to take them all because you ll have fun.

The purpose of having a quiz at the beginning of each chapter is to help you find out how much you already know about the topic of discussion in that chapter. These quizzes also help you discover preconceptions, prejudices, and myths about the topic that you may have been carrying around and using as if they were truths or facts.

The answers to the quiz questions are not handed to you, but they re not hard to find either. Even a cursory reading of the chapter will render the correct answers.

Quiz: What Did You Learn? What Will You Do?

At the end of each chapter, there is another chance for you to participate in your own learning. This section challenges you to take what you ve learned and immediately put your newfound knowledge into a plan of action, which you can then integrate with your planned or on-going process improvement work. This section will help you formalize and document your thoughts about what to do next and how, for whom, and with whom.

Natural Change

There are many fine references on the market today that address almost every known aspect of organizational and cultural change. This book makes no attempt to repeat, rehash, or improve on these works. Process improvement, whether it s via the implementation of standards such as ISO, using CMMI as the basis for improvement, or Six Sigma, represents a particular flavor of organizational change. And because I believe changing corporate culture is more effective ” certainly more efficient ” when it starts at the top, I ve included a chapter on this topic that will primarily benefit the executive or senior management sponsors of process improvement.

Yet, there are many gems of practical knowledge and executable truths pertinent to CMMI-based process improvement which I and my associates have come across. I share those with you throughout the text in sections with this title: Natural Change. The purpose of these golden snippets of information is to get you to stop and think about your current CMMI work and to look at your efforts through different and insightful perspectives.

Do s and Don ts

There s a certain percentage of you who love checklists, so checklists it is! At the end of each chapter, you ll find the most critical, pertinent lessons from that chapter summarized in a list of things you should do and things you should not do. Yes, of course you can skip the chapter and go straight to the checklist, but the checklist alone will not give you the full benefit of the concepts and actionable information found in the chapter. So be careful not to cheat yourself.