A Paradigm Shift Towards Agile

In a recent pair of “sales” meetings with CMMI-related prospective clients we encountered an interesting but unfortunately not terribly surprising commonality.

In both meetings, we learned that we had provided the prospect(s) with completely new and highly valuable information about their choice/need to pursue CMMI practices. This is the kind of outcome we at Entinex like… to demonstrate our value by being proactive and educational in our meetings. “Sales” appointments for Entinex are as much our interview of the prospect as it is their interview of us.

Here’s the unfortunate but not terribly surprising commonality: Ours wasn’t the first company to be interviewed by either prospect. And, the “highly valuable information” we were providing our prospects, to us, was actually rather fundamental. In our minds, we can’t go forward with an engagement without the kind of knowledge from our clients that this “highly valuable information” provides *us* — let alone what it means for the client. We guess this is what sets us apart in our industry and what allows us to be more “agile” than our colleagues.

In fact, after communicating the information, each client’s response/reaction was “That’s a really good question. We don’t know the answer. We didn’t know we had a choice. We have a choice?”

So… what was this critical piece of information?

Basically, it’s along the lines of asking our prospects, “what exactly is *your* client asking from *you*? And, have you considered taking this alternate approach towards meeting that expectation?”

?8^(blank stare of bewilderment)

Yes, valued readers, we were simply taking our clients’ customers priorities and values into consideration before we set about to solve their process needs.
(The actual question, it seems, must be a very proprietary thing since we sound like the only company asking it, so… I must put on my “CEO hat” once in a while and actually try to keep to ourselves some modicum of market differentiation — you understand.)

We also noted that in each case, the prospect assumed we’d be giving them a formal, all-too-common Powerpoint song and dance. Again, that’s not our style, and, it’s not focusing our attention where it matters most: on the client. Instead we simply sat down to talk about their situation and needs and dive into what they already knew about their own needs, filling them in on what they need to know before making a decision to go forward, and how we’d go about ensuring that we meet their expectations.

Herein lies perhaps one of the keys (if not the crux) to helping CMMI and other process-types along in their ability to understand Agile, and implement process disciplines that can also be Agile. The focus must be on the customer’s needs.

So many of our CMMI colleagues (often called “competitors”) focus on the implementation of the CMMI as the goal, when really, it’s not. What *is* the goal is helping *our* clients meet *their* business needs, and by doing that we are focusing our efforts on the right things and on things that help our clients make (or save) money.

Looking beyond the commonly-held value-proposition that process improvement has its own ROI, if we as an industry ever want to be able to make positive inroads towards the “agilization” of CMMI and other process disciplines, we must make the paradigm shift towards the customer’s *business* needs, and not just their prima facia stated goals of “achieving CMMI ‘level’ X”.