INTEGRATED VERSUS VERTICAL APPROACHES TO PROCESS IMPROVEMENT | Real Process Improvement Using the CMMI

Traditional wisdom and practices have held that the way to implement CMMI is to establish improvement teams ” commonly given labels such as PATs, Process Improvement Teams (PITS), or PAWGs ” to go off and define and implement new organizational processes and procedures along the lines of the process areas in the model, REQM, PP, MA, etc. This approach is perpetuated throughout the CMMI and process improvement community by practitioners and consultants , perhaps because it s too hard or just too scary to think about doing things differently. This vertical or silo approach to CMMI-based process improvement usually works, but it s slow and painful and there are better approaches. Traditional wisdom, as it sometimes turns out, can be an oxymoron.

The Downside to a Process Area Approach to CMMI Implementation

Teams charged with focusing process improvement on specific process areas tend to do exactly that ” they focus on specific PAs. Experience, my own and others, reveals that this type of approach can and often does result in one or more of the following situations:

The PA teams develop and define multiple processes which are not linked, integrated, or connected in any way. For example, there is no defined work or data flow from managing requirements to project planning to project monitoring and control. The process definitions are written as if a person or team would or could perform one process area in total isolation from other organizational processes.
The PA teams collectively develop excessive documentation. There will inevitably be a policy document for managing requirements, another policy document for project planning, and so on. There s nothing in the model that says you can t have just one process policy document that governs all the organization s processes, but this isn t usually what comes out of a vertical approach.
PA-focused teams tend to overlook or ignore the institutionalization aspects of process improvement. It s too easy to focus on building processes that cover the specific practices and it s also easy to not worry about how the process will be stored, accessed, retrieved, viewed , used, trained, communicated, and updated. Admittedly, CMMI is a vast improvement over SW-CMM in this arena. CMMI provides more explicit guidance for addressing the institutionalization aspects of process with its Generic Goals and Generic Practices.
PA-focused teams, especially those composed of inexperienced people, will develop processes and process assets mimicking the language of CMMI. When these things are later pushed out to people in the organization (the customers), they are alien and hard to relate to the work and the business. People who have always performed procurement jobs won t know that Supplier Agreement Management affects them and is related to their work. Oh, SAM that must be some other group of people who do that.

Don t forget: Even though this section talks about process improvement or process action teams, the establishment of such teams may not be necessary, and the organization certainly does not have to hire additional people to staff these teams. On the contrary, the organization will benefit from staffing these teams from existing experienced and knowledgeable personnel.

An Integrated Approach for Developing an Integrated Process System

Remember, CMMI is not prescriptive; it is not a set of instructions which your organization must follow. It is a body of guidelines, which is yours to carve up and implement any way your organization sees fit.

When you ve used CMMI to implement process improvement in a variety of environments and enterprises of different type and size , you will start to see some underlying, unheralded, and sometimes unmentioned themes that are integral to implementing CMMI-based processes. But you don t have time to go out and get that experience, so here it is encapsulated for your use.

You already know that CMMI is built from components such as Process Areas, Specific Goals, Specific Practices, Common Features, Generic Goals, etc. But what you may not know is that implementing CMMI-based process improvements involves some meta-components: components which transcend yet are interrelated to all of the CMMI components .

In my consulting firm s work with clients , we have discovered six implementation meta-components; I m sure there are more and I encourage you to look for them. These six meta-components and why they are important to CMMI implementation are discussed briefly in the following subsections:

Standards
Communication
Traceability and integration
Tailoring
Document management
Process implementation

Standards

No matter what kind of process or process asset the process focus people intend to build, they can build it faster and with higher quality if there is a predefined standard for the item. When most people think of standards as they relate to process documentation, they think of format and style standards, but format and style are almost inconsequential relative to content standards. If your organization hasn t defined standards for the process assets, doing so is going to seem like a hassle and a waste of time. The people doing process definition just want to jump right into writing the processes. They will eventually address the standards issue, but it will cost more later than sooner. For more information on defining standards read Design the Process Asset First, then Build in Chapter 5 ” Five Critical Factors in Successful Process Definition.

Communication

If a process grows up in an organization and no one hears about it, does it exist? Well, yes, but it s existence is meaningless. Communication is critical to all aspects of the development and implementation of an organization s process system, yet it is not a Process Area or Generic Practice. Look at all the following words, many of which are used in CMMI, that mean, imply, or have their basis in communication:

Report
Inform
Communicate
Status
Coordinate
Review
Read
Write
Talk
Teach/train
Present
Define
Listen
Send
E-mail
Meet
Call
Show
Describe
Discuss

So, what if you had a meta-component team that defined what information gets communicated in the organization and how that information gets communicated. Don t you think the other process definition teams could use those standards?

Traceability and Integration

Even if your organization takes the traditional path of setting up improvement teams based on PAs, they can still mitigate many future problems by establishing a team to integrate the disparate processes and process assets and establish and maintain the traceability or linkage between them.

I learned a hard lesson at Xerox. We had PITs which were individually focused on developing processes along the lines of SW-CMM s KPAs. At the end of about 18 months worth of work, these teams delivered some really great processes and process assets. However, before any of this good work could be implemented in the organization, we had to have an unplanned follow-on team define the integration: how the different processes worked together. In retrospect, there s no good reason why we didn t work the integration issues all along except that we just didn t know.

As processes are developed, the process integration team ensures there are interfaces or hand-offs between one process and another and that the traceability between organizational goals, the processes, and the measures collected is defined. This integration work can and should be performed in parallel with process design and definition and should not wait until the processes are completed.

Tailoring and Tailorability

We all recognize that, in theory, the concept of defined, structured process tailoring doesn t kick in until CMM or CMMI Level 3 (in OPD and ISM in SW-CMM and in OPD and IPM in CMMI). However, the reality is that even in organizations striving to achieve no greater maturity level than 2, business demands that projects and suborganizations be able to tailor the organizational processes and process assets. So, your choice boils down to either (1) ignore defined and managed process tailoring until the organization is moving toward Level 3 or (2) recognize that there are significant business benefits to introducing structured process tailoring early in the process improvement journey. As always, you decide.

Here s a way to get ahead of the curve on tailoring. Establish a process definition team that works in parallel with the other process definition teams. The charter of this team ” let s call them the Tailors ” is to review all the processes, procedures, and process implementation work products being designed and developed and define reasonable tailoring criteria and guidelines based on the needs of the enterprise. As the other process teams develop the processes and assets, the Tailors will be collecting historical data from the projects and using that data to establish fact-based categories or types of projects. The Tailors can then use the factors that determine project types to define realistic tailoring criteria and guidelines, which will be ready to pilot at the same time the processes are ready.

Document Management

Look at all the types of work and activities involved in designing and defining processes and process implementation assets:

Information gathering and organizing
Writing
Learning or training in document production or publication systems and processes
Editing for content, standards, style, grammar, spelling, etc.
Reading, reviewing, and providing input
Building forms
Establishing documentation links and cross-references
Establishing and maintaining version control
Uploading documents to online libraries and maintaining integrity

What all of this adds up to is technical publication and document management, which are not the typical skills people look for when they establish a process focus and process definition team. SEPGs and other process focus groups tend to recruit people with knowledge of CMM and CMMI and people with technical expertise such as project management, configuration management, etc. Yet most of the work such groups perform is the creation of documents (with the word document meaning some physical or electronic representation of information).

So, the meta-component is document creation, production, and management and you don t really want to pay highly skilled technical people or CMMI experts to struggle with MS Word doing work which they re not really good at doing. Establish a process subteam to have responsibility and authority to have a strong say in document design and to perform the production editing and formatting.

Process Implementation

Too often, the focus of people with process responsibility is the definition of the process or procedure document and not much thought is given to helping the users of processes implement them. There is a large and often overlooked or underestimated chasm between a process definition and its implementation. (Also read Work Product Based Approach to Process Improvement in this chapter.) There is also a difference between the skills required to define processes and the skills required to read a process and build things that can be used to implement it.

For example, look at the Level 2 PAs in the Project Management category, PP, PMC, and SAM, and RSKM in Level 3. It is relatively easy to write one or two organizational processes that tell people what they re supposed to do in these areas, but it s a different task to build things that show them how to do the project management work. In my work with organizations, the number of process implementation assets that usually need to be built far outnumber the number of processes. An incomplete list of candidate process implementation assets which could be built for the project management processes in our example includes:

Project management process checklist
Project initiation plan template
Project scoping worksheet, guideline, or template
ROM estimating worksheet
Life cycle selection criteria and guidelines
Project approval form
Stakeholder plan template
Project management plan template
WBS template
Effort and cost estimating worksheet, template, or form
Risk planning and management template
Project measurement subplan template
Project measures collection worksheet
Project configuration management subplan template
Project quality assurance subplan
Project status reporting template or form
Project review pro forma
Meeting agenda and minutes templates or forms
Project action item template
Project lessons learned pro forma
Project close-out checklists

It s just not good enough to put processes and procedures into peoples hands and expect them to go perform. Set up a process implementation asset team that is chartered with reviewing the processes and procedures as they are being developed, coming up with things that provide an interface between the processes and the people, and enabling people to perform the processes effectively and efficiently .