SG 1 Provide IPPD InfrastructureAn infrastructure that maximizes the productivity of people and affects the collaboration necessary for integration is provided. An organizational infrastructure that supports and promotes IPPD concepts is critical if IPPD is to be successfully sustained over the long term. An IPPD infrastructure includes the following:
SP 1.1-1 Establish the Organization's Shared VisionEstablish and maintain a shared vision for the organization. Establishing and maintaining the organization's shared vision involves creating, communicating, using, and periodically evaluating and revising the shared vision. An organization's shared vision captures the organization's guiding principles including mission, objectives, expected behavior, and values. The shared visions of a project's integrated teams should be consistent with the project's shared vision, which in turn should be consistent with the organization's shared vision. (See the definition of "shared vision" in the glossary.) Creating a shared vision involves establishing and actively maintaining agreement and commitment about what is to be done and how it will be accomplished, both procedurally and behaviorally. A shared vision is a result of an ongoing dialogue among all the people who will make it real. It continues to evolve as more ideas are shared. The organization's shared vision facilitates people working together, helps those people to attain unity of purpose, and creates a common understanding of the end state that the organization is aiming to achieve. The organization's shared vision must speak to every element of the organization. Effectively impacting the lowest levels of the organization necessitates impacting the highest levels as well. The organization's leaders need to be role models for the actions of the organization. Their commitment to IPPD is critical to its success in the organization. They must clearly communicate their expectations for the organization's projects and integrated teams and what the projects and integrated teams can expect from management.
The organization's shared vision needs to be grounded in reality. Organizations may be tempted to include in their shared vision broad statements about integrated teaming and employee empowerment. It is more important, however, to use the shared vision to set reasonable expectations on the rate of change in an organization. Unrealistic proclamations can transform the shared vision into a source of frustration and cause the organization to retreat from it after initial pilot demonstrations. The organization's shared vision should be articulated in sufficient detail to provide criteria against which the shared visions of the projects and integrated teams can be aligned. For example, the organization's shared vision should address the use of integrated teams for projects, the focus on the customer, and the concurrent development of both product-related life-cycle processes and the product. These concepts, in turn, should be reflected in the shared visions of the projects and integrated teams. Guidelines for how projects and integrated teams should develop their shared visions should be made part of the organization's process asset library. Maintenance of the organization's shared vision involves evaluating its use and currency. Results of evaluations may indicate the need to update the organization's shared vision or to establish and maintain organizational practices and structures that implement the shared vision. Typical Work Products
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SP 1.2-1 Establish an Integrated Work EnvironmentEstablish and maintain an integrated work environment that supports IPPD by enabling collaboration and concurrent development. An integrated work environment includes the physical infrastructure (e.g., facilities, tools, equipment, and support needed to effectively use them) that people need to perform their jobs effectively. Properly functioning environments help people communicate clearly and efficiently about the product, processes, people needs, and organization. An integrated work environment helps integrate the business and technical functions and the interfaces among teams, projects, and organizations. The integrated work environment must accommodate both collocated and distributed integrated teams as required. Two-way communications media should be easily accessible by all relevant stakeholders. Encouraging open dialogue by providing communication mechanisms enables everyone to effectively engage in and contribute to information sharing. Appropriate mechanisms might include meeting rooms, email, fax, FTP or Web sites, video teleconferencing capabilities, and others depending on the organization's culture and its project and integrated team preferences for efficient and effective information sharing. The types of information needed, which agents (projects, integrated teams, or individuals), and how many of them produce, own, and need that information should be considered in deciding the mechanisms to be used. Integrated communication tool sets reduce time spent converting information from one medium or platform to another, and correcting transcriptions or misunderstandings when people do the conversions. Requirements for product and process information usability throughout the life of the product are important characteristics to consider in the selection of information-exchange tools. In an IPPD environment, it is particularly important that the tools for designing and developing the product-related life-cycle processes are integrated with the tools for designing and developing the product and product components. Integrated work environments are developed with the same, or greater, rigor as that used to develop a specific product or service. Integrated work environments are capital assets that are often expensive, have unique implementations, are irreversible (their implementation can destroy or make unusable the assets being replaced), and whose modification disrupts ongoing activities. The rigor appropriate to the development should be matched to the magnitude of the needs to be resolved and the deployment risks. Typical Work Products
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SP 1.3-1 Identify IPPD-Unique Skill RequirementsIdentify the unique skills needed to support the IPPD environment. Refer to the Organizational Training process area for more information about determining training needs and delivering the training. IPPD is a sufficiently different view of product development that the organization's leadership and workforce will need to develop new skills. IPPD requires integrative leadership, and interpersonal skills beyond those typically found in traditional environments where people tend to work alone or primarily interact with others from their own, or similar, functions or disciplines. Specific skills emphasized in an IPPD environment include the following:
Training to support these new skills must be established and maintained to sustain the ongoing adoption of IPPD in the organization. Each integrated team member needs to understand what is vital to other team members in terms of product characteristics and the descriptions, expectations, and interfaces of the processes associated with the other functions represented on the team. This understanding can often be augmented through cross training of individuals across their function or discipline boundaries. Collaboration among integrated team members is essential to create a team product rather than a collection of independent products. Enhanced interpersonal skills can help bridge the differences among disparate functions and disciplines as well as the differences in cultures, values, and backgrounds. Leadership demands also increase under IPPD. Leadership challenges include: ensuring that all team members mutually understand their roles and responsibilities; employing people in their intended roles; and effectively accessing the depth and wealth of specific expertise resident in the organization and integrating it into the overall integrated team effort. Typical Work Products
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SG 2 Manage People for IntegrationPeople are managed to nurture the integrative and collaborative behaviors of an IPPD environment. In an IPPD environment, special attention needs to be paid to aspects of organizational leadership and management. Nurturing integration necessitates focus on the objectives, values, and behaviors that are needed to affect integrated teamwork. The organization establishes the IPPD guidelines and processes that become part of the organization's set of standard processes and the project's defined process. The organization's standard processes enable, promote, and reinforce the integrative behaviors expected from projects, integrated teams, and people. For all IPPD processes and guidelines, people are recognized not as the tools or means to the end, but as part of a mutually beneficial collaboration to achieve the objectives. In stimulating the integration needed, team-related incentives may be appropriate for people who work together. However, the value of individual excellence should not be overlooked. A balanced approach that addresses both individual performance as well as team performance would help maintain high standards of both team and individual achievement. Expectations from projects, integrated teams, and people are typically communicated in the form of policies, operating procedures, guidelines, and other organizational process assets. SP 2.1-1 Establish Leadership MechanismsEstablish and maintain leadership mechanisms to enable timely collaboration. Implementing IPPD introduces challenges to leadership because of the cultural changes required when people and integrated teams are empowered and decisions are driven to the lowest level appropriate. Effective and efficient communication mechanisms are critical to timely and sound decision making in the integrated work environment. Once an integrated work environment is established and training is provided, mechanisms to handle empowerment, decision making, and issue resolution also need to be provided to affect the timely collaboration of relevant stakeholders required for IPPD. In an IPPD environment, it is particularly important that clear channels of responsibility and authority be established. Within the projects and the organization, issues can arise when individuals or integrated teams assume too much or too little authority and when the level at which decisions are made, or who owns what decisions, is unclear. Organizational guidelines that scope the degree of empowerment for integrated teams serve an issue-prevention role. Best practices promote documented and deployed organizational guidelines that can preclude issues arising from empowerment and authority misinterpretation. Empowerment does not necessarily mean that every decision in an IPPD environment must occur at the lowest level, that it must be done collaboratively, or even that it must reflect consensus among all integrated team members or project participants. Decisions on the style and procedures for leadership and decision making for projects and among integrated teams need to be made in collaboration with the relevant stakeholders. In establishing the context for decision making, the various kinds of issues are described and agreements are reached on the decision type that will be used to resolve each kind of issue.
For many issues, a command decision may be adequate. For issues that require several different areas of expertise or that have far-reaching consequences, collaborative decisions may be more appropriate. Defining decision types and the authority of those entrusted to make decisions enables efficient operations. Mechanisms that grow leadership talent enable lower organizational unit delegation, which, in turn, enables faster, better responses to changing customer needs, technology, and environmental conditions. Leadership characteristics cannot be viewed as solely embodied in the manager/leader. When leadership characteristics are evident in more than the leader, individual group members lead decision making and activities that heavily involve their areas of expertise. This flexibility can result in improved group efficiency and effectiveness. Even with well-intentioned empowerment, leadership, and decision making, issues will arise that cannot be resolved at the same level. An organizational process for issue resolution can form the basis for project-and integrated-team-specific procedures and help ensure that basic issue-resolution avenues are available to projects and integrated teams when unresolved issues must be escalated. An organizational process for issue resolution can serve both issue-resolution and issue-prevention roles. Typical Work Products
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SP 2.2-1 Establish Incentives for IntegrationEstablish and maintain incentives for adopting and demonstrating integrative and collaborative behaviors at all levels of the organization. The recognition and reward systems in an organization are one of the motivators for behavior and value changes. To support IPPD, the recognition and reward systems (both positive rewards and negative consequences) need to recognize a shift in values from a single point of success or failure (e.g., providing a management incentive package to the product or program manager alone) to integrated team success or failure (e.g., providing layered incentives to integrated team members based on degree of involvement and contribution). Individual excellence still should be recognized, but criteria should discern whether such excellence was achieved at the expense of the integrative behaviors expected or in support of them. For example, individuals (such as leaders) removing integration barriers or implementing collaboration capabilities may be just as important as an integrated team performing well. Care should be taken, however, not to single out individuals for recognition for a team's achievement. Incentives should be consistent with the objectives of the organization and applied to achieve desired behavior at all levels of the organization. Criteria can establish guidelines for the reassignment of people who are unable to demonstrate desired behavior and the selection of people who can exhibit desired behavior for challenging or important jobs. Compensation is not the only motivator, although giving an object of some value is an appropriate recognition. Reinforcement of positive behavior via thanks or praise is usually appropriate, especially soon after the observed performance of a task. Such immediate recognition reinforces the collaborative nature of working in an IPPD environment. If staff must wait for yearly performance appraisals, their motivation for working outside of their strict functional job description is lessened. The yearly performance appraisals also need to be addressed. Review mechanisms should be structured so that both home organization supervisors and team leaders contribute to a person's performance review. Typical Work Products
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SP 2.3-1 Establish Mechanisms to Balance Team and Home Organization ResponsibilitiesEstablish and maintain organizational guidelines to balance team and home organi zation responsibilities. Here "home organization" refers to that part of the organization to which personnel are assigned when they are not in an integrated team. This home organization may be called the "functional organization," "home base," "home office," or "direct organization." Regardless of what it is called, it is often responsible for the career growth of the personnel assigned to it (e.g., performance appraisals and training to maintain functional and discipline expertise). In an IPPD environment, reporting procedures and rating systems should recognize that people's responsibility is focused on the integrated team, not on the traditional home organization. A balance must be struck, however, because the responsibility of integrated team members to their respective home organizations is still important, specifically for process implementation and improvement. Workloads should be balanced among projects and functions, while ensuring career growth and advancement. Mechanisms should be created that support the home organization responsibility but align the workforce to meet business objectives in a teaming environment. Striking this balance is difficult for an organization but exceedingly important for the personnel and the success of IPPD implementation. The balance must be reflected in the personal or career development plans for each individual. The knowledge and skills needed for an individual to succeed in both their functional and integrated team role should be honed, taking into account current and future assignments. Guidelines should also be in place for disbanding teams and maintaining home organizations. It has been observed that sometimes teams attempt to remain in place beyond their productive life in organizations that do not have a home organization for the team members to report back to after the team is dissolved. Typical Work Products
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