SLASH-AND-BURN VERSUS NATURAL PROCESS IMPROVEMENT


SLASH-AND-BURN VERSUS NATURAL PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

With not so fond memories, I often recall my years growing up in Central Florida. It was the late 1970s and early 1980s and the region was undergoing explosive growth. Amusement parks, tourist attractions, hotels, golf courses, and housing developments popped up, it seemed, overnight. Orange groves, pasture land, and woodlands were bulldozed, burned, and paved over at a frightening rate that could never seem to satiate the endless stream of new residents and hoards of greedy developers. To save money, developers would employ slash-and-burn techniques and destroy every living thing on the targeted land. Later, after putting up the buildings or sculpting the golf course, they would plant smaller, younger versions of the exact same trees and shrubs that had previously lived there. Presumably, this replanting was done to give the developed area a natural look. Not surprisingly, even after decades of expensive grounds maintenance, the reengineered patches of wild Florida never achieved the level of ecological splendor that had been leveled to dirt and ash in a few days.

The Slash-and-Burn Approach

Unfortunately, like the Florida developers, slash-and-burn is also an approach often used by well-meaning but misguided people involved in process improvement, and it s an approach particularly favored among IT outsourcing firms. In slash-and-burn process improvement, process zealots, whether they take the form of new outsourced management, outside consultants , or insiders fresh back from some process class at SEI, march into the organization like an occupying army. They may look at the organization s process forest, but they see only the tangle of the underbrush and not the naturally evolved beauty and maturity. Without slowing down to get a feel for the existing culture or to take a survey of the existing process landscape to find what good practices may inhabit this landscape, these process people quickly determine that there is no process or discipline, only chaos. Just as quickly, the process crusaders determine that the primitives need CMMI and they need it now whether they like it or not. After all, it s for their own good and they ll thank us later.

To be fair, it s not always the process shock -troops who make the call to bulldoze the existing culture. More often than not, these heavy-handed approaches are the result of a command-and-control structure up to the highest levels in the organization. The CEO mentions in passing one morning over coffee that perhaps we could use this CMMI thing to make some improvements and by the time the message has been amplified downward through the minions of underlings wanting to please the boss, the message has become, you d better get to Level 5 by next year or else!

A slight variation of slash-and-burn SPI occurs sometimes when those of us in the process business simply forget that we exist to improve business and technical processes for the benefit of individuals and organizations. When this happens, process becomes the business. We forget that the project managers, engineers , configuration specialists, and senior managers are our clients and that we serve them, not the other way around.

Symptoms of the Slash-and-Burn Approach

The ethnic cleansing version of process improvement isn t always as easy to notice as you might think. If you suspect that the organization you re in may have experienced or is experiencing slash-and-burn process improvement, look around for these symptoms:

  • You ask a process person (such as a SEPG member) who their client is and how they are serving the client and you get a funny , confused look that says, what are you talking about?

  • You can t find anyone who can name one goal for the process improvement effort other than the achievement of a maturity level.

  • There s a prevailing belief that no processes existed before the CMMI initiative began . (Partial answer to Quiz Question 1.)

  • None of the members of SEPG or your process focus group have any roles or responsibilities other than process or CMM/CMMI implementation.

  • No matter how people were doing things before, they re not allowed to do it that way anymore; they have to follow the new procedures. (Partial answer to Quiz Question 1.)

  • No matter what someone is doing, when you ask him or her why they re doing it, they tell you, because the process requires it.

  • People with software delivery responsibilities can recite CMMI practices or the identifications and titles of their organization s policies and procedures.

  • Estimates for process overhead in development projects exceed 15 percent of the projects total effort.

  • The volume of standards and procedures increases , while the quantity and quality of delivered products decreases.

  • People use words such as audit, inspection, and compliance.

  • People refer to CMMI requirements or SEI requirements.

  • People quietly make jokes about the process police or the process Gestapo.

Results from the Slash-and-Burn Approach

Both the slash-and-burn approach and the process is the business attitude can have unintended but disastrous consequences, including but not limited to:

  • Soon (within six months) after the outsourcing cut-over or the initiation of the process improvement effort, the highly skilled or expert employees and managers leave the organization in barelyconcealed disgust.

  • People remaining in the organization are demoralized.

  • The organization s return on investment (ROI) and/or return on assets (ROA) drops because of funding spent on process improvement increases without a measurable business return.

  • The process improvement initiative experiences multiple false starts.

Years ago, I witnessed one of the worst cases of slash-and-burn process improvement. I led a CMM appraisal (CBA IPI) [5] on a medium- size unit (about 100 people) of a very large outsourcing company. After we delivered the appraisal findings, I was approached by few people who had been with the organization more than eight years and had been employees of the company that had the contract prior to the outsourcing. These old timers pulled me aside and wanted to tell me something important; I was listening.

What they said floored me! They said that, after eight years spent in process improvement, they were happy that their organization had finally achieved the maturity level it had attained before the outsourcing. Noticing my jaw hitting the floor, they filled me in: Oh yeah, we had defined processes and used them to manage and control our work, but when [company name withheld] took us over, they told us to throw away all our processes and start doing things the [company name withheld] way. Overlook, for a moment if you can, the human toll ” the senseless demoralization of a skilled workforce. Think of the tragic waste of money this particular slash-and-burn CMM effort represents. Name Withheld is a publicly traded company. Wouldn t you be even mildly concerned if you were a stockholder?

Fortunately, there is a better way to approach systems process improvement that is not only kinder and gentler, but also more cost-effective and efficient. It is a natural approach and it s partially described in the following section and then more fully addressed in Chapter 4 ” Process Improvement Strategies that Work.

The rest of this chapter describes some of methods you can use to search for and recognize native practices in an organization that can be leveraged when implementing CMMI-based procedures. For more detailed information on cultivating and growing the organization s native processes and practices, go to Chapter 4 ” Process Improvement Strategies that Work and read the sections titled, Process Improvement: Good, Fast, or Cheap, and Natural Process Improvement through Weeding and Nurturing.

Why People Slash-and-Burn

Who really knows , but based on a sampling of the characters I ve watched employ this approach, here are some reasonable guesses at root causes:

They don t know any better. This is the easiest excuse to forgive because in this case the pushy process people aren t malicious, just ignorant. They ve never been exposed to any other type of approach to technological or cultural change, so they just go with what they know. If they re not wedded to the status quo and if they can learn something new without feeling threatened, there s a good chance of getting them to change.

They are control freaks. Without getting too Freudian, you know the type. These are the people who insist on everything in the workplace being done a certain way ” their way. Never mind that most people in this category live a personal life outside of work that is screwed up beyond repair. Sometimes, the more dysfunctional they are outside of work, the harder they try to beat others into compliance with rigid rules in the workplace. If their perceived control is threatened, they can be vindictive.

They are afraid. Plain and simple, if the culture of the organization is one of command-and-control in which people do what the boss says or else, don t expect to find a lot of creative thinking in play. It doesn t matter if the procedures are not useful or even disabling; the rules are the rules and you will follow them. A special category of this character commonly found in this environment is the fear-biter, someone who attacks when pushed into a corner and is suffering maximum fear.

It s the culture. There are cultures in which the slash-and-burn approach to process improvement seems perfectly normal and, in fact, aligns very well with the prevailing culture. For example, you ll often find the symptoms of the slash-and-burn approach in organizations in which a high percentage of the managers are former military. They are accustomed to giving and taking orders and following and having them followed without question. In such corporate cultures, it doesn t particularly matter if the orders make sense or even make money, they are followed. Questioning the orders and challenging the status quo, both of which are healthy to organizational growth and adaptation, are behaviors which are not appreciated and are usually punished by the management. Fear is the unspoken , unwritten motivator. A variation of this culture exists in other parts of the world in which the driving goal is achieving a CMMI maturity level as fast as possible at all cost.

[5] Dunaway, D. and Masters, S., CMM-Based Appraisal for Internal Process Improvement (CBA IPI): Method Description (CMU/SEI-96-TR-007) , Carnegie Mellon University, April 1996.




Real Process Improvement Using the CMMI
Real Process Improvement Using the CMMI
ISBN: 0849321093
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 110
Authors: Michael West

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