Archive for the ‘Performance’ Category

Blaming CMMI is just another symptom … of LCPBCs

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

Stop blaming CMMI for bad processes.  Stop blaming CMMI for not getting real value from performance improvement efforts.  Used correctly, CMMI fixes processes, doesn’t make bad processes.  Bad processes are a symptom of using CMMI incorrectly and blaming CMMI is to run away from the true issues.  The true issues are that the organization/company doesn’t have a culture to support high performance results long before anyone thought to use CMMI.

This is most typical of level-chasing pathological box-checkers who want ratings at any expense to effectiveness, morale or efficiency.

You can always tell these types of organizations from those who truly want to improve.  Level-chasing pathological box-checkers (LCPBCs) don’t know what their own processes are, and when they start to look they don’t like what they see but refuse to do anything progressive about their ineffective, inefficient, and otherwise broken processes.  LCPBCs often rule by fear in one form or another; they don’t practice TQM, don’t employ Lean principles, don’t value when people challenge the status quo, don’t value the expertise of people not in powerful positions, and don’t empower their people to make decisions or to take responsibility for the entirety of the health and well-being of the organization.  LCPBCs are also easily picked out of a crowd by their belief that you can improve performance without changing anything difficult and by limiting whatever changes might happen to the technical staff alone.  You’ll often find them hunting for “CMMI in a box” (or even “agile in a box”) and they’re looking to do it cheap, fast, and start “right now!”.

True, that some executives are LCPBCs because they don’t know any better, but there’s hope for those executives who are interested in making informed decisions.  Others are doomed to low returns and continued recurring process (and appraisal) costs.  Slapping CMMI on top of such a discordant, caustic, corroded, and sick culture will only make things worse.  And, blaming CMMI for failures to produce advertised outcomes, or for costing time and money and adding no value is just another symptom of the problems that existed in such organizations before CMMI was ever introduced.

Blaming CMMI is just the latest cop-out excuse in what’s likely a long list of excuses for the organization’s failures to materialize success –
It’s not CMMI … it’s immature, unreliable, culturally caustic organizations being exposed by the dust the CMMI stirs up.

Next time: How to not be a LCPBC: Making the marriage of CMMI and Agile a no-brainer.

SEPG North America – Day 1

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

With yesterday being the "tutorial day" ahead of the conference, today was the official kick-off day of the conference sessions.

Morning started off in a laid-back way.  Even better than sleeping until 7am was having breakfast with Pat O’Toole,  Just a never-ending fount of wisdom and experience.  Truly, if I ever needed an injection of fresh ideas for my practice, I’d start with him.  We are all blessed with different advantages, one (or two?) of Pat’s is having two brothers who are both behavioral psychologists from whom he siphons oodles (technical term) of techniques.

IMGP0952 After missing the plenary sessions, my first attended session was David Anderson’s CMMI Through a Lean Lens.  Excellent stuff!  What I enjoyed most about it was how easily and convincingly one can see the benefits and accessibility of high maturity behavior with very little data and no artificial, convoluted process models.  Nothing more than a few simple development "states" and a calendar.  The richness of something as simple as a cumulative flow diagram was very well presented and, I believe, quickly grasped by the audience. 

David had some suggestions for CMMI v2.0 to accommodate "continuous flow" instead of "transactional processes".  He also suggested that continuous flow lent itself more to perceiving development as a service rather than a discrete project effort.  It was very telling (to me) how eager the audience is growing over just a couple of years for this sort of data that they were raptly engaged in David’s content and seemed unconcerned for over-staying the room’s allocated time for his talk.

Next up was Judah Mogilensky’s proposal for a new CMMI process area called Fantasy Development.  He started out with a brief overview of an earlier proposed process area, Blame Allocation, which has strong strategic ties to the Fantasy Development process area.  Of many, one priceless anecdote was, "What’s with all this stuff about managing requirements and planning, and measuring progress?  Why can’t CMMI have anything in it that we actually do?!?!"

Sadly, he’s not joking.  He’s heard this before as have I.  Not realizing what they’re admitting, people who don’t understand CMMI are missing the connection between CMMI and their real work.  Unfortunately, whether they admit it or not, many organizations have very well-established and highly productive processes for allocating blame and developing fantasies for which Judah’s proposed PAs are meant to help improve. 

As with earlier incarnations of these proposals, Judah made an important point: any area of work important to an organization can be improved with and measured against improvement practices and goals of their own creation.  Nothing says CMMI must be the only source of improvement ideas.

Since he would be leaving later in the day, I spent a while after lunch with David to discuss ideas on lean and CMMI.  It’s becoming clear that the world cannot wait for SEI or annual LSSC events to bring these topics together.  There’s just too much synergy, both in terms of maturing organizational processes (from both a CMMI and non-CMMI perspective) and in terms of affecting culture and behavior that enables and promotes the quantification of these improvements. 

Something I observed on the Savannah River on my way back to my hotel was blissfully (in a geeky way) appropriate for discussing continuous flow with David.  (Watch the video if you’re interested in that.)  He came to the same conclusion as I did, and, it was exactly what the deck hand on the ferry said happens in such situations.

David and I went to see Pat O’Toole’s session on "Maturity Level 4 Results in a Lot of BS."  Never at a loss for a compelling title, Pat’s topic had to do with behavior, not what you might think.IMGP0954 His example walked through 10 behaviors of high maturity teams that were exhibited by an appraisal team by the mere tracking and projecting of time during a particular appraisal task near the end of an appraisal.  His example (masterfully, of course) demonstrated simple measurement and analysis traits with profound effects on both performance and behavior while they were being tabulated in real time.  It was like watching magic.  Not in the "unbelievable" sense, but in the "pure beauty of simplicity" sense.  David and I made quick note that Pat would be a must in any sort of Lean-CMMI event.

The conference gala reception ended the official activities.  The simple movie-theater theme included rooms where two modern films shot in Savannah were playing: Forrest Gump, and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and a movie-style.concession stand full of popcorn, candy bars, nachos & cheese and Cracker Jack.

Not all rosy

Although I led the reviewer group for agile content for this year’s conference, I was not able to commit to attending all the agile-related presentations.  So I am making it a point to query people attending these sessions for their immediate reactions.  Reports from several people about presentations and tutorial content on "agile" topics is revealing a disappointing condition.  Namely, that the "dark side" of the force is still strong in much of the content people are communicating.  Several manifestations are cropping up including poor understanding of true "agility" and "lean" concepts and practices, re-purposing traditional approaches but calling them "agile" or "lean" by merely eliminating the obvious waste, and diluting the benefits of CMMI to enable achievement of ratings by teams using agile.

What’s most disappointing is that this content is supposedly the "best" of the crop of submitted abstracts which tells me that we need a better topic submission and review process.  Namely, that what we ask for when proposing topics needs to be improved, and, how we review the proposals needs to be changed.  A few years ago, the conference committee attempted an overall broad-based improvement for similar reasons but only came up with increasing the word-count on abstracts and asking for "take-aways" for each proposal.  I guess this falls under the category of, "just because a little isn’t good, doesn’t mean more is better."

We need a better process.  I’ll be providing that feedback at tomorrow’s conference retrospective.

Day’s Conclusion

One thing was abundantly clear from today: I was being given glimpses of the same idea over and over from many facets.  That idea was about behavior.  Behavior is central to improvement.  End of discussion.

Culture will follow behavior, whether good or bad.  People’s responses to input will be manifested in their behavior and that will be in response to the stimulus.  I’ve known the central criticality of behavior in the continuum of improvement.  However, the key "nugget" for me today was that it’s surprisingly simple to influence behavior in positive, productive, value-added ways.  And, it’s also not as hard as we might think to turn "bad" behavior around with similarly simple, yet powerful examples of the benefits we want when we conduct ourselves with the behaviors that achieve them.

My conversation with Pat at breakfast, David’s cumulative flow diagram, Judah’s tongue-in-cheek process areas, the port’s fast clearing of their container backlog, Pat’s "BS" presentation, and other side-conversations I won’t detail here, all orbited on this one theme: behavior and how we affect it is the future of business performance improvement and we’d better get on that ferry right now.

My Caloric Rise to High Maturity Health

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

Today I put myself into a program of health and fitness with the express purpose of "putting my body where my mouth is".  For the next 6+ months I plan to track specific health & fitness measures as part of an overall performance objective of increasing my endurance, losing body fat, and gaining better health.  Using the values, principles and practices of high capability CMMI, I will demonstrate statistics & quantifiable results.

Making this effort public and committing to report the results by SEPG-Europe 2010 is part of the effort to personally motive myself to stay on track.

I plan to track normal effort for about a month, then to begin looking for patterns, correlations, and perhaps even causality.  In particular, I plan to seek processes, baselines, and models that I can begin to experiment with to achieve higher performance and better/faster/long-lasting results.  I would like to be able to have specific patterns and models which I can use and manipulate for specific conditions (such as travel, availability of exercise equipment, lack of planning/control over food choices, and other variations).

I would like to be able to further determine the critical sub-factors that I can focus on when I don’t have all the ideal conditions for weight and exercise management.  For example, what’s more important: total calories or calories from some specific source?  What’s more influential: what I eat or whether I exercise?  What should I try to control more: meal frequency or meal size?

If I had to pick a few things that I could easily manage over time, which would they be?

I would like to result in a long-term sustainable program the works for me no matter what my circumstances, and, if/when I can’t control all the variables, what *specifically* can I do to get specific results and how long will it take to get back to where I want to be

Using practices from Measurement and Analysis (MA), Project Planning (PP), Project Monitoring and Control (PMC), Process & Product Quality Assurance (PPQA), High Maturity, and others, I will work towards specific process performance objectives in personal health.

Business objectives (Within 6 months from 15 November 2009):

  • Reduce body fat at least 40 lbs.
  • Increase endurance/intensity at least 20%.
  • Reduce waistline to no greater than US size 38
  • Maintain or increase total muscle mass.
  • Understand the influence/impact of processes, patterns and tools on health.
  • Establish a manageable, defined sustainable process for my personal health including:
    • how much I need to eat and of what
    • how much I should exercise and what types of exercise
  • Create a long-term strategy for well-being.

The information I need is:

  • Nutrition data (Calories IN)
    • What I eat
    • Calories from what I eat
    • Distribution of calories in terms of fat, carbs, protein and fiber.
    • When I eat
  • Exercise data (Calories OUT)
    • Type of exercise
    • When I exercise
    • Intensity (specific to exercise)
    • Calories burned
    • How long I’ve exercised
    • How I feel afterwards
  • Weight data
    • Weight
    • Date and time of day
    • Have I eaten before weighing?
    • Have I exercised before weighing?
    • Have I relieved b/m before weighing?
    • Was I wearing clothes?
  • Clothes size data
    • Waist
    • Chest
    • Thighs
    • Hips/Butt
    • Neck

I plan to eat no more than 2400 calories/day, up to 6 "meals" or snacks per day.
I plan to exercise a minimum of 5 days/week
I plan to weigh myself once/week.
I plan to measure my clothes size measurements once/month.

For years I’ve been using the image of a fit man as an example of a "model" for health, and I’ve been saying that despite the fact that he doesn’t represent all men in all situations that he can still be an example of what "fitness" can be.  I usually joke about how, despite the fact that the man-in-the-picture’s waist is probably smaller than my own thigh, I can still pursue a level of fitness that works for me that would appear as fit as the man despite our differences.

The time has come for me to make good on that joke and to pursue fitness in a way that I have never done before, and, I believe, is a way that I must pursue to finally settle the question for myself of "what does a ‘fit’ me look like?"  It’s a question I’ve been after for nearly 40 years.  For about the last 10 years I’ve suspected the answer will be found in a profound exploration of my own personal process performance.

I hope to reach my initial objectives in time to:
1. Reach a steady state condition such that I can report on both the initial drop as well as some aspects of a "maintenance" state.
2. Have something to report by the time the presentation materials are due.

For years I’ve been using a health analogy to describe process improvement; to describe the differences between a prescription and a description of improvement.  With this fitness project, I will demonstrate how a few simple values and concepts can be leveraged into an entire approach using high maturity practices that convert these descriptive concepts into very specific execution of practices that work for me, and can possibly demonstrate both process improvement and high maturity for others.

I have avoided this inevitable and dreaded project for years.