CMMI – News and Views

Why do the CMMI Generic Practices (GPs - the 2/3 of CMMI that is devoted to sustaining your change) rarely get referred to in publications that discuss the relationship (good or bad) between CMMI and Lean Six Sigma?  It seems the CMMI’s Specific Goals and Practices get all the press – the sexy components of the model!  Probably because they are generally easier to understand, implement and are much more related to the day job?  Anyways I digress.

What I wanted to blog about was how the CMMI GPs are a great source of best practices for ensuring Lean Six Sigma improvements stick  (are institutionalized in CMMI terms). Process improvement is ‘business improvement’ and that means achieving cost reduction, productivity improvement etc.  The only way to obtain these benefits is by changing the way people work and by sustaining that change so the benefits remain realised.  Lean Six Sigma is much weaker on sustainment than CMMI.  The GPs provide the best practice for ensuring that the new processes are ingrained in the way you perform your work and that there is organisational commitment and consistency to performing your processes.  Using the best practice codified in the CMMI GPs means your processes are far more likely to be actually used – particularly during periods of stress.

The synergy between the CMMI models and Lean Six Sigma is epitomised by the CMMI GPs associated with high maturity (levels 4 and 5. i.e. quantitatively managed and optimising process).  A well implemented Lean Six Sigma initiative would intrinsically be implementing  most, if not all, of these high maturity CMMI GPs.  However the lower maturity GPs such as training, evaluating adherence to the process or identifying and involving stakeholders are not well covered by the Lean Six Sigma method or techniques – and this is one of the reasons why in our experience its often hard to get such improvements to “stick”.  In other words a Lean Six Sigma improvement would benefit hugely from using the lower maturity level GPs as a basis for making those improvements stick.

So if you’re embarking on a Lean Six Sigma initiative or have one in place then take a look at the CMMI Generic Goals and Practices.  Give them the press coverage they really deserve.

I was just reading ‘Lean Six Sigma for Service’ by Michael L. George and in the introduction to part II ‘Deploying Lean Six Sigma in Service Organisations’ he describes what needs to be in place for achieving the full potential of Lean Six Sigma. He points out that studies show that 8 out of 9 failures of significant change efforts in such organisations were related to implementation.

The biggest challenges he identified were:

• Management commitment: Attaining CEO and P&L management engagement
• Resource dedication: Achieving 1% (or more) of employees … assigned to continuous improvement efforts
• Project Selection: Choosing improvement projects based on strategic goals/needs prioritised to increased value (ROIC)
• Lean vision: Recognizing the need to eliminate process waste and delays (in terms of work and/or costs) – not just improve quality – to achieve their operational goals
• Data-driven management: Using process knowledge and data to make decisions

In addition to these, I have noticed a pattern in successful Lean Six Sigma implementations – process is either obvious or the organisation is “just mature enough” to be able to “tangibalize their processes”.  As a point of note this doesn’t mean a big folder full of processes, it means the organisation has a “coherence” about it which you can see and feel.

This got me thinking with my “other” “CMMI hat on.” When I am asked to briefly explain CMMI I approach the answer by saying that first and foremost CMMI is a structured model of process best practice requirements right across the lifecycle. You meet these requirements with process – the processes that drive your business. In addition CMMI has a number of other dimensions and in particular contains practices focussed on the business of establishing and sustaining your processes and in establishing an enduring continuous process improvement environment.

So returning to Michael George’s points what does this mean – well what it means is that to establish an enduring, sustained Lean Six Sigma improvement environment we should overtly (or covertly) “borrow” the sustainment and continuous process improvement practices from CMMI. Remember, CMMI contains the “requirements for your processes” so its not prescribing how you implement things its just saying what you need to achieve.

If you are interested in peeking in more detail then I suggest you have a look at Generic Goal 2 – which is focussed on sustainment of process change, and also the organisational process areas – which are focussed on establishing and maintaining ways of working. One of the nice things about the practices called out here is that to successfully implement them in your organisation you need to bind in and involve senior management in an enduring manner – not surprisingly enough this talks directly to a couple of Michael’s points.