THE MODEL AND THE REALITY

Both SW-CMM and CMMI provide excellent guidelines for planning and managing projects. It s too bad that lots of people involved in process improvement work fail to see the relevance of these guidelines to their work. But even if we just focus on software- intensive systems, CMMI does not or cannot address many of the realities of project planning and management. CMMI works as designed because it was never intended to be used by organizations as a convenient substitute for thinking.

Some of the mushy, sticky, gray areas of real project management for which you won t find an easy solution in CMMI include:

Inability to establish a consensus understanding of the word project (see Establish a Common Language in this chapter). Determining the origination of a project and figuring out which comes first, requirements or planning. If you don t have requirements, you technically don t have a reason to plan, but don t you need to plan requirements activities?

Implementing processes and procedures using tools. It s easy to say, develop a WBS for the project, but almost all of us will be required to implement that task using some sort of tool. Whether the tool is as simple as writing the work breakdown structure (WBS) tasks on a whiteboard or as complex as using an enterprisewide project management system, there will be dependencies and constraints inherent in the use of the tool that will make the actions more difficult than the words.

Prioritizing work issues. In a perfect world as seen from the view of a model, there are a group of people who work on the project team and they work on that one project until it s finished. While they work on the project, they answer to the project manager. In the real world, people are rarely dedicated to only one project. People must spread their time out over dozens of projects, tasks, and organizational activities. People report to many bosses for the different work they perform and people usually get very little guidance from anyone on how to prioritize their work because each of the bosses tell them that their work has the highest priority. CMMI won t help you much here.

This chapter won t prescribe any answers for these situations because there is no one answer. There are lots of possible solutions, all of which depend on the specific organization s strategy and business model. What this chapter will do is provide experience-based knowledge of how to plan and manage a project for implementing CMMI-based process improvement. This information represents many lessons learned from multiple process improvement projects.