DOING ALL THE RIGHT THINGS FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS | Real Process Improvement Using the CMMI

Let s start by asking the one question so many people who report to you are afraid to ask: Why? Why is the organization implementing CMMI? Why is our organization trying to achieve a CMMI maturity level? It often costs midsize to large organizations hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to implement CMMI-based process improvements or to achieve a maturity level; what will our organization get in return for this expenditure? Most people who report to you won t ask why because the obvious answer is that you told them to do it and that s good enough for them. However, you re at or near the top; you re the one making the decisions. Maybe you should think about why your organization is doing this CMMI stuff. Maybe some day, someone to whom you report will ask you why? You will probably want to have a good answer.

There are some very good reasons to use CMMI (and other models or bodies of knowledge) to improve the way people in your organization work. There are both quantitative reasons which are easily measurable and qualitative reasons which are not so easy to measure.

However, there are some really bad reasons to undertake CMMI-based process improvement. Process improvement, whether it s based on CMM, CMMI, ISO, Six Sigma, TQM, Critical Chain, or __________ usually represents a significant investment by the organization. Yet some of the common underlying reasons organizations often undertake these initiatives almost guarantee the organization will not be able to realize the return on its investment. Currently, many organizations start CMMI-based process improvement efforts for one or more of these three reasons:

The H oly G rail/ S ilver B ullet (HG/SB) syndrome
Corporate lemmingology
A golf course understanding of model-based process improvement

The Holy Grail/Silver Bullet Syndrome

The HG/SB syndrome is one of the common yet often unspoken reasons managers and executives initiate an undertaking as expensive as CMMI (see Figure 7.2). HG/SB is characterized by the following symptoms:

A zealous belief that some magical combination of tools, processes, and models will solve all the organization s problems
An obsession with throwing away resources on a crusade to find the HG/SB
An immunity to most facts and data

Figure 7.2: The Holy Grail/Silver Bullet (HG/SB) Syndrome

There is no cure for the HG/SB syndrome except for executives to realize there is no HG/SB, never has there been one, never will there be one. Information and knowledge are the cure.

Corporate Lemmingology

Natural SPI (Figure 7.3) has coined this phrase to describe what many of us know as keeping up with the neighbors. The symptoms of corporate lemmingology are:

A pathological jealousy of other organizations (e.g., maturity level envy)
An obsession with throwing away time and money to keep up with other organizations
A culture of following (blindly), not leading
An immunity to most facts and data

Figure 7.3: Corporate Lemmingology

This is probably the most insidious of the bad reasons for taking on CMMI-based process improvement because its root cause is ego or fear: fear that your competitors will do something that helps their business while you get canned for not doing it too. The only cure for corporate lemmingology is for the leadership to stop following the pack, set their own course, and not worry when people say, well, so-and-so is doing CMMI; why aren t you? Courage is the cure.

A Golf-Course Mentality of CMMI-Based Process Improvement

This one is actually understandable (see Figure 7.4). No human being, not even Super-CEO, can possibly learn and know all the details of everything that is going on in his or her enterprise. This is one of the reasons organizations are hierarchical with multiple layers of management. At some volume of information flow, there is a critical mass of people needed by the organization to sort , sift, filter, and make sense of all that information. Regrettably and almost always inadvertently, the person at the top has to make some assumptions about something going on in the organization or simply has to accept and trust what she is being told by subordinates . This can lead to the allocation of valuable resources toward undefined or misunderstood goals and purposes. Such is often the case with CMM or CMMI. The executive only has the time to understand and believe that doing that process improvement stuff is good for the organization and let it go at that. What she doesn t realize is that she must get personally involved in leading that organizational change if it has any chance at all for success.

Figure 7.4: A Golf Course Understanding of Process Improvement