Sample from the CMMI FAQ… and it’s working title.

Well, after putting fingers to keys to answer some of the CMMI FAQs, I’ve been able to conjur-up a name:

Entinex’ brutally honest, totally hip CMMI FAQ.

Here’s a sample question (and answer):

Q: How long does it take?

A: Here’s another one of those dead give-away questions that a company is more interested in the rating than the improvement.

OK, that’s a little unfair.  Let’s just say that as often as we hear this question, our judgmental attitude holds for ALMOST everyone who asks it.  Alright, so maybe you are the exception.  The truth is, it’s a fair question.  For every company. 

A rare few companies don’t care how long it takes.  Lucky them.  Applying a generous dose of benefit of the doubt, we can assume that the question is asked not for "how soon can we get this out of the way?" as much as from "are there any rules that dictate a minimum time before performing an appraisal?" How we can tell whether the company is interested in the improvements vs. the rating is simply a linear function of how long into the conversation we are before it gets asked. All-too-often, the source of the question is less ignorance of the process and more ignorance of the point behind going through the process.

Process improvement purists wish more people were more interested in the journey than in the destination.  We are process improvement pragmatists.  We know you’re not looking at CMMI because you had nothing better to do with your time and money.  That’s for Bill Gates and his very worthy charitable endeavors.  The company he’s famous for founding is still in business for the money.  FAST.  So, how long it takes is a real question regardless of how you spend your money.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the answer lies within you, young grasshopper.  Really.  We can’t give you a much better answer than that.  What we can do, however, is give you a list of the attributes that you can use to estimate how long it will take you, and give you a few example cases and some very general time-ranges.

Let’s start again with our favorite analogy.  Say you’re carrying around about 40lbs (18.18kg) of excess body fat.  How long will it take you to lose the fat?  A year?  Two?  6 months?  Can one person do in 6 months what another person needs 2 years?  We all know the answer to these questions.  "IT DEPENDS!"

EXACTLY!  How quickly a company can become rated to a pre-determined point in the CMMI’s rating scale depends entirely on them and their circumstances.  It depends on:

• their level of commitment,
• their tolerance for and ability to implement change,
• how busy they are,
• what they know about process improvement in general and CMMI in particular, and
• it depends on where they are as a starting point and
• how much of the organization they want to include in the rating.

Working backwards from the appraisal itself, the absolute minimum calendar time a company should expect between when the starting gun is fired and when they cross the finish line is a simple matter of logistics.  Probably about a month if they’re lucky.  Two months would be more realistic.  These 2 months, of course, are just the logistics and prep-work necessary to plan and conduct the appraisal and the activities that lead to an appraisal.  Obviously, this time frame would only be realistic if the company was completely ready for the appraisal, had done all their homework, knew exactly what the state of their process implementation was and were literally trying to do nothing more than figure out how much time they had before they could conduct the appraisal.  Of course, such a company wouldn’t be asking the question.  They’d already know.

So then there’s almost everyone else. Everyone else needs time to first determine where they are in their implementation of CMMI practices.  This is like saying, first we need to find out how much excess fat we’re carrying around.  A trip to the right physician would answer this.  For CMMI, it’s called a "Gap Analysis" and can take a week or two.  Then, depending on those factors bulletted earlier, the gap found by the analysis would need to be filled.  This is the part where a company would need to figure out what it’s optimum sustainable diet and exercise routine should be, and, how long to stick with it to see the desired results. 

In CMMI v1.1, there are 25 Process Areas.  The duration of the gap closure activities would also be a function of how many (and which ones) of the Process Areas the organization wanted appraised.  Each of the Process Areas could be analogous to some aspect of a healthy lifestyle such as food choices, food quantity, shopping, cooking, meal planning, exercises, frequency, repetitions, technique, equipment, blood work, rest, stress management, work environment, time management, and so on.  Obviously, the more of the lifestyle someone wanted to adopt, the longer it would likely take.

Once a gap is filled (i.e., the weight is lost), an organization should give itself at least 3 months on the short-project end to 12 months on the larger project end to actually use their processes.  This would provide them with enough data to actually conduct an appraisal.  On the fat-loss analogy, this would be like finding that point where diet and exercise are enough to keep the weight off and one is able to demonstrate to themselves (or others, as needed) that they can, in fact, live and sustain a healthy lifestyle — in the face of temptation and other uncertainties.

Once people internalize how process improvement works, how long it takes to earn a rating is a question such people stop asking.  Like fat loss, process improvement is a discipline backed by many best practices.  And, just like weight loss, people are still seeking a "silver bullet".

We, on the other hand, stick to a healthy diet and exercise program.  When we’re off track we know it.  We gain fat and feel like crap.  When we’re on it, we see the results.

Make sense?