Archive for the ‘business case’ Category

CMMI Institute to Help Companies around the World Elevate Organizational Performance

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013

Delivers Process Improvement Frameworks with Proven Business Results

Entinex is a proud partner of the CMMI Institute. We have been using CMMI and its predecessors to help elevate performance for over 16 years and have seen the value of the models to deliver measurable business results for our clients. We look forward to working with the CMMI Institute to extend the reach of the CMMI frameworks to enable individuals and organizations to reach their goals.

Our Founder, CEO, and Performance Jedi, Hillel Glazer continues to be the pathfinder for bringing CMMI, lean and agile practices together. He furthers his involvement by playing a critical role in helping the CMMI Institute formulate its strategies and carry out several important projects, including providing important input to the success of their SEPG conferences and foundational material for CMMI’s product suite in the agile market.

(Also, see this article on CMMI in SD Times.)

November 20, 2013 09:00 AM Eastern Standard Time
PITTSBURGH–The CMMI Institute announced today its strategy to extend the reach of the CMMI model to enable businesses of every size in every industry to elevate performance and to provide tools that equip CMMI practitioners to begin and to grow their journey with CMMI.

The CMMI Institute, established by Carnegie Mellon University, is home to the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), a gold standard of excellence in software and systems development. The Institute will continue to help this market to solve business problems while advancing the use of the model to new industry sectors around the world.

CMMI is used by some of the world’s most admired and innovative organizations, including Samsung, Accenture, Proctor & Gamble, and Siemens. CMMI adoption has been a powerful differentiator for businesses and a catalyst for economic growth in regions that invest in its broad adoption.

“To compete in the global market, leaders must build organizations that can consistently deliver quality and value in products and services,” said Kirk Botula, CEO of CMMI Institute. “The CMMI Institute enables organizations committed to excellence to achieve measurable results in the facets of their business that matter most to their goals. CMMI provides a framework of practices that can help organizations to identify and address key challenges to improve performance and the bottom line. We all know work is not the way it is supposed to be—CMMI helps make it better.”

The CMMI model was developed at Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI) through collaboration of government, industry, and academia to help the Department of Defense and its contractors like Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing improve their software engineering capabilities. Widely trusted as a mark of reliability, many organizations require CMMI adoption as a pre-requisite for bidding on contracts.

Thousands of companies across multiple industry sectors in 94 countries have adopted its practices to elevate performance and have been appraised for capability and maturity using CMMI methods. The CMMI product suite includes product development, service delivery, procurement, and staff management—making it a worthwhile investment for any business. Carnegie Mellon University founded the CMMI Institute in order extend the benefits of CMMI beyond software and systems engineering to any product or service company regardless of size or industry.

KK Raman, Partner Business Excellence, KPMG India says, "Carnegie Mellon is a pioneer in developing best practices and transitioning them to industry, and this is reflected in the global adoption of the CMMI. KPMG is one of the premier organizations around the world with over a decade long partnership with CMU. We help use the CMMI Institute product suite—frameworks, training, certifications, and appraisal methods—to achieve organizational goals by enhancing processes."

Extending the Benefits of CMMI

The global adoption of CMMI is supported through a vast network of partners who guide organizations in the successful adoption of the CMMI models. As part of today’s news, CMMI Institute is advancing the practice of CMMI with an online self-assessment tool as well as new professional credentials for practitioners.

  • CMMI Self-Assessment Tool: A new online tool that allows organizations to begin their journey of elevating performance as well as to diagnose their existing implementation by assessing the current state of their organization. By answering a brief set of questions, users will gain critical insights that provide an analysis of an organization’s strengths and weaknesses as well as solutions to improve the capability of their organization.
  • CMMI Associate and CMMI Professional Certification: The CMMI Institute will be offering certifications to help individuals translate their experience with CMMI into professional development opportunities. CMMI Associate and CMMI Professional Certifications will provide confirmation of an individual’s knowledge of basic and advanced concepts in CMMI and demonstrate to current and prospective employers they are dedicated to excellence and have valuable skills to help elevate organizational performance.

"As a professional who uses CMMI daily in my work, I am committed to advancing my understanding of the models and to helping my clients and my organization position themselves to successfully meet their goals. The practitioner credentials will not only provide a clear path for my growth, it will also help me to communicate and validate my skills to my clients as well as my organization," said Capri Dye of Hubbert Systems Consulting, Inc.

The CMMI Self-Assessment Tool and Practitioner Certifications will be available in early 2014.

About CMMI Institute

The CMMI Institute, a subsidiary of Carnegie Mellon University, is dedicated to elevating organizational performance through best-in-class solutions to real-world challenges. The Institute is the home of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) for Development, Services, and Acquisition; and the People Capability Maturity Model which are process improvement models that create high-performance, high-maturity cultures. The models are used in thousands of organizations worldwide to deliver business results that serve as differentiators in the global market.

About Entinex

Entinex, Inc. is an aerospace engineering firm bringing the same skills and critical thinking used every day in aerospace to solve complex business problems. The creative, technical, and audacious characteristics of aerospace are leveraged to create elegant, inspiring, and break-through solutions to real business challenges to companies throughout the world in many fields and industries. The company’s approaches see through hairy, complex business problems with x-ray-vision-like clarity and accuracy and designs, explains and implements solutions with amazingly powerful yet easy-to-apply simplicity.

Posted in Business Benefit, CMMI, Culture of Excellence, Engineering, Executives, Getting Started, High Performance, Improvement, Leadership, Performance, Process Improvement, Productivity, business case, competitiveness, strategy, value | Comments Off

Doing Agile CMMI without “Doing” Agile or CMMI

Monday, November 8th, 2010

There’s an under-appreciated reality of what either agile or CMMI can accomplish for an organization.  In particular, it’s not as much about what either accomplishes for an organization as much as it is about what an organization does for itself that achieves agility and systemic improvement.

It seems to be a decades-old issue that many technology-oriented companies, and, it seems, especially software companies, struggle with organizing and managing operations towards excellence.  I can’t even begin to dig into any reasons why this is so, but there may be some truth to the stereotype about technology people not being good with business and/or people. ;-)

I’ve found something fascinating that is fairly consistent across many companies I’ve visited or discussed with colleagues.  What’s fascinating about it is not only the consistency across multiple fields, industries, verticals, and national boundaries, but that it reinforces a position I’ve taken since beginning my career.  That position is the afore-mentioned “under-appreciated reality”:

Aligning the organization with specific business goals and providing a supportive culture
leads to broad behaviors at all levels that result in high performance.

OK.  So, that may not seem earth-shattering.  But there’s a lot in this statement about agile and CMMI that too many organizations to “get”.  And, this is where all the anecdotal evidence from the many companies comes into play:

Organizations with a culture of excellence generate behaviors (including setting and pursuing specific business goals) that achieve agility and systemic improvement without specifically setting out to achieve either “agile” or “CMMI”.

Throughout my earlier career, I was routinely frustrated by “training” that provided me with specific tools and techniques for dealing with “many common” situations – pretty much all of which were cultural, interpersonal, and otherwise based on human behavior.  The cases, examples, and solutions all felt very canned and contrived.  Why?  Because, in effect, they were.  They were very specific to the context and would only solve issues in that context.  What the examples lacked – and by extension, the entire course – was fundamental tools with which to deal with situations that were not neatly boxed into the provided context.  In other words, these training courses provided practices. These practices work in explicit situations, but they fail to provide the basis upon which those practices were built.  Without such a basis, I and other consumers of this “training” could not address real situations that didn’t match the training’s canned scenarios.

“Doing” agile or CMMI by “doing” their respective practices results in exactly the same limited benefits.

Making agile or CMMI “about agile” or “about CMMI” accomplishes little value and lots of frustration.  These are only practices.  Practices are devoid of context.  A culture of excellence and an explicit business case to pursue improvements provide the necessary context.

We see this all the time.  For example, for decades in the West mathematics was taught in a way left many students wondering, “what will I do with this?”  (This may still be true in many places.)  It was/is taught without any context to how it can help them better analyze and understand their world.  As a result, Western students have historically been less interested in math, do less well in math tests, and are less inclined to study in fields heavily dependent on math.  All due to being taught math for math’s sake and not as a means to a beneficial end.

Medicine is also taught this way around the world.  Leading too many doctors to seeing patients as packages “symptoms” and “illnesses” rather than as people who need help.  Scientific exploration often gets caught up in the same quandary.  Exploration is the goal, if you’re looking for a specific answer, it’s research.  When you’re trying to create a specific solution it’s development.  Mixing-up “exploration” with R&D will frequently result in missing interesting findings in pursuit of narrow objectives.

In agile practices, what’s more important: doing Scrum or delivering value?  Pair programming, or reducing defects?  Maximizing code coverage in unit tests or testing the right parts of the product?  “Doing” Scrum, pairing, and automating unit tests are intended to deliver more product of high value, sooner.  Focusing on the practices and not what’s best for the customer are missing the point of these practices.  Same with CMMI.

What are the economics of your core operation?  Not just what your group costs to operate on a monthly basis, but what unit of value is produced for any given unit of time?  How do you know?  Why do you believe your data is reliable?  The ability to make decisions relies on data and when the data is unreliable, decisions, plans and anything else that relies on the data is questionable and risky.

It turns out (not surprisingly) that when a group focuses on what’s important AND has the economic data to reliably understand the behavior of their operation, it aligns their actions with the very same goals set-forth in both agile and CMMI.

Focusing on the right things in your operation will cause behaviors that achieve agility and “rate well” against CMMI.  Whether or not you’re even trying to “do” agile or CMMI.

Posted in Attitude, Business Benefit, Culture, Culture of Excellence, Data, Improvement, Performance, Training, agility, benefit, business case, competitiveness, excellence, lean, operations, practice, ratings, value | Comments Off

Where to start. . . .

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

So much is going on that what’s been keeping me from posting for over two months has pretty much been a lack of focus on where to even start and what to share that is of value.

So, first of all, I must beg your indulgence in what might not be the most advice-filled or productive posting from a reader’s perspective. I’m hoping, at least, from my end that it will be somewhat cathartic in helping jar loose something useful for all of us.

I’ll start with a list of what I’ve been up to, professionally, since my last post.
Maybe that will bring up some salient threads:

  • Working on CMMI v1.3 — specifically coming up with language that will make it through the review board to help provide some Agile perspectives.
  • Working on an article for CrossTalk on CMMI and Agile “needing” each other.
  • Preparing presentations and tutorials for: Scrum Gathering, CEE-SECR, Agile Development Practices, and SEPG-NA-2010, and SEPG-Europe-2010.
  • Working for the SEI on, and delivering several pilots of, Introduction to CMMI for Services class.
  • Becoming a People-CMM SCAMPI Lead Appraiser.
  • Learning about the Resiliency Management Model.
  • Program committee work for SEPG-NA-2010.
  • Working on strategic issues with SEI for the Partner Advisory Board.
  • Early planning for an AgileCMMI conference (probably 2 days in DC in Winter 2010).
  • Incorporating more Kanban and lean (process excellence) into our efforts.
  • Gathering data and case work for at least two books-in-work (one on Agile, another on process excellence).
  • Of course, there’s client work and,
  • Contrary to what the above list may imply, I’m actually working on transforming the messaging of Entinex to be less SEI-centric and more aligned with what we actually do.

Perhaps it’s that last bullet that bears some discussion.

Despite knowing that we specialize in lean and agile methods in all our work, recently, someone asked whether we only use SEI tools and techniques.   Obviously, it seemed an odd question since SEI doesn’t provide any tools or techniques with “agile” pasted on them.  But it got me to thinking, “yeah, really, what are we truly up to?” And I concluded this:

Aligning effort with the need to satisfy expectations.

You can expand on that in a number of ways. Chiefly, whose need? The business’ needs. Whose expectations? Customers’ expectations. Merely satisfy? Of course, not. To exceed and delight.

We bring to bear whatever tools and techniques will help make this happen.

In all cases, we’re deeply in pursuit of process excellence and what we’ve learned is that it’s irrelevant to lead with anything from either the SEI or the Agile community. What’s relevant is results. Powerful ones.

In truth, I’ve known this all along, but our messaging was anything but this.


Conversations with David Anderson, Jim Benson, Alistair Cockburn, Jesse Fewell, Alan Shalloway, Ahmed Sidky and many others in the agile world, plus my experience working with SEI, SEI Partners, and clients over the last several months have really surfaced some critical distinctions for me about managing effort, developing products, delivering services, and growing organizational competencies.


Many organizations want to implement agile or CMMI or whatever but they’re failing to account for two critical pieces:

  1. Understanding their own business, their own competencies, the details of their efforts be they services, development, management, (etc.), their own value stream, and everything it takes to get things done and get paid.  And,
  2. Making a business case for change whatsoever.  Without the first piece, this piece is worthless, so it’s logical that organizations fail to make a business case for changing things if/when they don’t understand enough about their business.

I find myself more and more having to walk clients and students through both 1 and 2 before we can move on to making meaningful improvements.  Neither 1 nor 2 begin or end with Agile or SEI-stuffs.  Sometimes we can leverage Agile or SEI-things to help motivate organizations to address 1 and 2, but it’s seldom a strong prod.  It’s become very much like another in a string of tests-of-commitment for clients and prospective clients.  We’ll lead them to water and it becomes very evident through not just whether they drink, but how they get the water to their mouths as a determinant in our ability to help them become a success story.


This is where to start, and if organizations are already here, fabulous.  If not, their work is waiting.

Posted in business case, motivation, starting out, understanding | 1 Comment »