CMMI – News and Views

In my last posting I described some of the changes to the CMMI being considered for version 1.3.  There is another interesting change that I think has significance for many service organisations.  In the current version of CMMI for Services, 16 of the 24 process areas in the model are “core”; meaning that they are shared by all 3 of the constellations (DEV, ACQ and SVC). One other process area, Supplier Agreement Management (SAM) is shared by both DEV and SVC. It doesn’t feature in ACQ because …well that is the point; ACQ is SAM pumped up on purchased steroids!

For this first release of the model, these core or shared process areas have been taken pretty much unaltered from the “parent” DEV model. There are a couple of significant changes but the essence of the process areas, and more importantly their titles remain the same. There in lies the rub, so to speak, because some of the process area titles, Project Planning (PP), Project Management and Control (PMC), Integrated Project Management (IPM) contain that “Project” word. In fact the word “Project” is peppered throughout the model. It appears in practices, subpractices, notes and explanations all throughout.

Now for Development oriented people, the word project has a distinct and important connotation. Projects tend to be fairly big pieces of work lasting from days to years in length. However they are limited in duration; they have a distinct beginning, a definite middle, and you sure hope they are going to end, because we want to deliver something. But in the Services arena the word “Project” doesn’t really mean anything. A frequent complaint from Services organisations is “But we don’t do projects!”.  Work is often made up of small repetitive units, maybe lasting minutes and you might continue to this for an open ended period of time. The terrible temptation is to think these parts of the model don’t apply to us as a service organisation, or even worse to think the whole model is called into question.

Interestingly, my observation from leading a number of CMMI-SVC appraisals now, is the direct opposite of this conclusion. In fact, the parts of the model most Services organisations need to address most urgently are the planning parts. I tend to find Service organisations are reactive. They react very quickly to customer requests and often even quicker to customer complaints or problems. For me it is not surprising that frequently when we appraise Service Delivery (SD) and Incident Resolution and Prevention (IRP) process areas, significant chunks are done, and often quite well. If you think about it, if you are in a service organisation and you don’t have some form of service agreement and you don’t deal with the customer’s requests, you are not going to be in business very long. In addition, because you may have done things reactively, you may not have got it completely right first time. In which case you better have a way of dealing with the resulting incidents (i.e. IRP). So often it is the specific practices of these process areas that are done, but the generic practices are frequently less well performed. In other words the more longer term thinking that the generic practices engender is missing, and this could in part be summed up as “planning”.

So what should planning look like for a service oriented organisation?  Well for a start it doesn’t need to look like a project and secondly it doesn’t have to be planned in excruciating detail for each “instance” of delivering service. Think about it when you next walk into your favourite hamburger joint. When you ask for your favourite burger choice do you expect the attendant to sit down write a plan for delivery of said burger, get it approved and execute the plan. Of course not.

But what about running the restaurant? How are we organised for delivering burgers? How many servers do you require? When do you need them? How many hours can I expect them to work per shift? How many shifts do you need? If we have new attendants what skills or training do they need before we let them loose on an unsuspecting public? And so on. Planning is about thinking of things in advance. It provides a framework within which people can cooperate to achieve some goal. It does not matter whether that goal is a tangible product or an ephemeral service.

In the services organisations that I have appraised, sure they achieved the goal a lot of the time. But how much running around was needed to do it? How often did we not achieve the desired outcome? How much is making it up as we go along, preventing us from getting to do some other important things?

So for services organisations plans are a different beast from their project managed cousins in DEV and ACQ. But their existence lets us put an environment in place that better achieves our goals and does it more effectively and probably more efficiently too. They are more often higher level in nature than project plans, but their purpose is no less in telling individual team members how their efforts fit into the bigger picture.

Which brings me back to CMMI v1.3. It is currently proposed that the word “Project” be replaced by something else in the Service model. This might be the word “Work”. So we would end up with Work Planning; Work Monitoring and Control. This might remove some of the barriers to understanding why these process areas are still important for service organisations. I hope so, because from my perspective, this might be the track to making a lot of people’s lives a bit easier.