CMMI – News and Views

I was hoping to do a bit of a “live” blog from CMMI made Practical but my aspirations were overtaken by the Icelandic Ash cloud.  Some 25% of our speakers were from abroad and many were stuck at home.  When you do your contingency planning for a conference you don’t assume you can lose 25% of your speakers with 48 hours to go and still have your delegates.  In the end Webex came to our rescue.  We have been using this for about 6 months and I have been very impressed with it.  It came into it’s own as a means to enable the presentations to be done remotely.  It wasn’t without difficulty.  The kit which the presenters were using did have an effect on the audio quality and doing Q&A without a microphone back to the presenter was very problematic (we just couldn’t make the phone work 2 way for some reason).  The reason this affected me was I am our “expert” on Webex.  So that was it… I had a new job for 2 days!  It did have some upside as I am often unable to see all the presentations I want to…. but it gave me an excuse!

The ash cloud chaos did not prevent some of our foreign speakers and delegates getting there.  Many miles had been driven and many hours were spent getting there.   For me the most notable story was the Norwegian Armed Forces team.  Sigurd Heier was presenting, he also had one of my team (Kieran Doyle) with him in Oslo.  Sigurd felt an obligation to get Kieran home and also get to the conference to present.  So after exploring a number of options they drove to Brussels (over 1000 miles) where Kieran blagged a 4 seats on a Eurostar.

It was a great conference and I will be blogging more over the next few days.

BT DFTS’s Steve Haighway and Terry Weatherill gave a fascinating talk on CMMI “a year on during an economic downturn”.  Steve and Terry answered the question that will have been met by so many improvement leaders during the current downturn – what do you do to hold the gains when all around you the organisation’s focus moves with the economic cycle to cost cutting and shrinking investment.  Well Steve and Terry’s talk gave a spirited view of how necessity can indeed be the mother of invention and that by intelligent use of various tactics and the “levers” available to them you can hold the gains made previously and even move forward in some areas.  The talk presented a wealth of practical pragmatic measures that the team actually implemented that focussed on ensuring further institutionalisation – or as they put it “better glue”.  Terry talked the audience through each generic practice and explained how they had used each generic practice to help them design practical steps to further cement their ways of working.

The talk went onto talk benefits – and best of all the team confirmed that they had maintained customer satisfaction scores which in the midst of a significant down turn and whilst delivering an immensley complex programme is no mean feat.  Significantly a year on the team reported that the focus provided by CMMI had enabled the programme to become far more “forward looking” than ever before and one example of that was that they now know “how much sales effort should be expended” for a given size bid and if this drifts out of bounds then they now have early warning that perhaps something is wrong with the proposed workpackage.

Lamri’s Head of Delivery Frank Johnstone distilled years of leading successful CMMI driven improvement efforts across a wide variety of organizations into a highly informative one hour presentation entitled “You are the Project Manager”.  He did not focus on project management basics but instead focussed on those activites so often forgotten by new improvement managers – namely Selling, Planning and Implementing.

Frank made the point that a common trap is not to sell the new initiative to significant stakeholders – in other words if you fail to shape the proposed instinctive such that stakeholders know instinctively that it is “the right thing at the the right time” then you are likely to face a torid time moving forward.  It may sound counter-intuitive to folk new to this but when you are proposing a major change initiative (because make no mistake that is what you will be attempting to carry out) it is essentially to follow an internal sales process of listening, shaping and morphing until you are able to succinctly articulate “why the organisation should be interested” and “whats in it for the stakeholders”.

Frank went on to shed light on the almost inevitable call for a benefits case.  His view based on extensive experience is that organisations “starting off” rarely have the track record of data to enable a crisp business case – so if your internal processes mandate this then go take some of the lower quartile benefits published by the SEI and map them into your organisation.  He also made the very shrewd point that sometimes the call for the benefits case is a delaying tactic by the organisation so be alert for that and if you detect it it means simply that either the organisation is just not ready or that you have failed to articulate the proposed initiative in a manner that is instinctively acceptable to the organisation.

Frank went onto to discuss planning and made a big point of giving yourself time to plan out the approach to be taken.  You must be able to clearly articulate your proposed approach and be certain that it fits the organisation now, that it is sympathetic to the current power structures  and that you have the wherewithal to deliver it.  Lastly Frank discussed one dimension of the implementation – that being that high profile visual status reporting is a significant boon to the programme allowing busy senior management to “manage by exception” which in a typical early stage CMMI transformation is the best you will achieve.