Archive for the ‘Services’ Category

SEPG North America 2013: Why You Want to Be There!

Thursday, August 22nd, 2013

Why Do You Want to Be There?
This year, the conference is significantly re-orienting itself towards END USERS. Previous SEPG conferences had a lot of useful information, especially for experienced change agents and consultants in the field.

This year, the focus is on up-and-coming disciplines, established success strategies, and most importantly, direct business performance benefit of using CMMI. In fact, what we’ve seen over the years is that CMMI is working extremely well with other forms of improvement as well as with existing defined service delivery and product development approaches — whether agile, lean, traditional, customer-focused, innovation-focused, or some combination.

CMMI provides a specific framework that is both a way to focus attention on specific needs while also benchmarking progress. Instead of flailing around trying to find where to put improvement energies, or waiting for a long-term traditional approach of process exploration and decomposition, CMMI takes a lot of the guesswork out by leveraging decades of experience and laying out very specific goals to seek to improve performance.

CMMI users have reported their productivity to increase magnitudes of order, costs drop in double digits, and their ability to cut through thick process jungles more quickly than being left alone to their own devices.

Yes, I’m speaking and presenting at SEPG 2013, but that’s the least relevant reason to attend. Come because you want to see what others are doing to marry CMMI with existing (or new to you) concepts; come because you want to hear from other end-users what they’re doing with CMMI to improve performance. And, most of all, come because you want to get and stay ahead of your competitors who aren’t using CMMI nearly as effectively as you will after attending.

SEPG North America: The CMMI Conference is coming soon, but there is still time to register.

This year’s conference program will include content perfect for you if you are:

  • Beginning to implement–or considering implementation of—CMMI
  • Seeking resources and best practices for integrating CMMI and Agile practices
  • Interested in taking your process improvement game up a level
  • A fan of rivers, boats, bridges or baseball !

Check out the conference agenda here: http://sepgconference.org/sepg-north-america-agenda and when you register, enter the promotional code "Entinex" to save $100 on your fee. (Or just click this link and the discount will be applied for you.)

Book before September 1st to get a discount on your hotel room, as well.

Get the details on the website (http://sepgconference.org) and email sepg@cmmiinstitute.com with any questions.

Posted in Agile, Agile+CMMI, CMM, CMMI for Services, Customer Satisfaction, Development, Discipline, Efficiency, Engineering, Goals, High Performance, Improvement, Innovation, Kanban, Maturity, Performance, SEPG, SEPG Conference, SEPG North America, Services, agile SCAMPI, lean, measurement, operations, value | Comments Off

Agile is a Service: You May Be Improving the Wrong Things

Sunday, October 9th, 2011

So much about software development (in particular, and product development in general) as a business has less to do with technology than it has to do with keeping customers happy.  What do customers really care about?  While they say they want their product on time, on budget and doing what they asked of it to do, most of the time, managing their expectations has little to do with time, cost, features, functions, or quality.  What they experience is more about how the developer treats them as a customer.  In other words, what they perceive as the developer’s business as a service is what customers react to.

Of course, customers aren’t typically happy when the product is late, doesn’t do what they need it to do, and/or costs more than they were expecting to pay – scope creep notwithstanding.  Be that as it may, agile development and management practices recognize the importance of customer involvement (and all stakeholders, in general).  In fact, while the “traditional” development and management world has long espoused the importance of an integrated team for product and process development, it’s the agile development and management movement that actually made it work more smoothly with more regularity.

(Before anyone from the “traditional” development camp jumps down my throat, keep in mind: I came from the traditional camp first and saw attempts at IPPD and saw how difficult it was to get it going, keep it working, and eliminate the competition and other organizational stress that IPPD continues to experience in the traditional market.  And, I’m also not saying it doesn’t work in traditional settings, just that it worked much better, much faster, and with much more regularity in the agile settings.)

From the beginning, agile practices understood the importance of the customer and of being a service to the customer.  Kanban (more recently) even refers to different types of work as “classes of service”.  In fact, if we look at the most common pains in development work (e.g., staffing, time, agreement on priorities and expectations), we see that it’s seldom technology or engineering issues.  They’re issues more aligned with the developers’ abilities to provide their services.

[NOTE: For the remainder of this post, I’m going to assume the development operation actually knows its technology and knows what real engineering development looks like.  This is a big assumption, because we all know that there are development operations a-plenty whose technical and engineering acumen leave much to be desired.]

Let’s now look at another importance facet of all development, agile notwithstanding.  Much of it happens after the initial product is released!  Once the product is released, there is precious little actual development going on.  The ongoing support of the product includes enhancements and other updates, but very little of that work requires any engineering!  Furthermore, what is worked-on comes in through a flow of requests, fixes, and other (very-often unrelated) tasks. 

After a product has been released, the operation of a development shop resembles a high-end restaurant far more closely than it appears as a production floor.  Once the menu has been “developed”, from that point forward, patrons merely ask for items from the menu and for modifications to items on the menu.  Even were there to be a “special order” of something not at all on the menu, the amount of “development” necessary to "serve” it is minimal.  And, when something truly off-the-wall is requested, the chef knows enough to respond with an appropriately apologetic, “Sorry, we can’t make that for you right now.  Please let us know in advance and we’d be happy to work something up for you.”  At which point, they would set about developing the new product.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the work is actually just plugging away at the service.  In the service context, development is often not the majority of the work.  In that context, engineering plays an important role much less often than the ability to deliver services, manage transition of services, ensure continuity of service, handle incidents, manage resources, and so on.

What does this mean for agile teams, and, what does this have to do with CMMI?

Well, maybe much of the perceived incompatibility between CMMI (for Development) and agile practices are not due to incompatibilities in CMMI and agile, but incompatibilities in the business of agile and the improvement of development.  In other words, maybe the perceived incompatibilities between CMMI and agile are because CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV) is meant to improve development and many agile teams aren’t doing as much development as they are providing a service.  Perhaps it’s just that the business models presumed by the two approaches are not aimed at making progress in the same way.

When agile teams are doing actual development, CMMI-DEV should work well and can help improve their development activities.  But, agile teams are often not doing development as much as they are providing a service.  They establish themselves and operate as service providers.  Most of the agile approaches to development are far more aptly modeled as services.

CMMI for Services defines services as follows*:

  • A product that is intangible and non-storable.
  • Services are delivered through the use of service systems that have been designed to satisfy service requirements.
  • Many service providers deliver combinations of services and goods. A single service system can deliver both types of products.
  • Services may be delivered through combinations of manual and automated processes.

*Glossary CMMI® for Services, Version 1.3, CMMI-SVC, V1.3, CMU/SEI-2010-TR-034

Many requests made of many agile teams have more to do with supporting the product than developing a product.  While the product is still under development, then, by all means, CMMI for Development is apropos.  But after the initial development (where more product-oriented money is spent), the development is hard to see and harder to pin down.

Maybe, improving development is not the right thing to develop.  Perhaps agile teams could look at how they handle “development as a service” for their improvement targets.  Maybe CMMI for Services is a much better fit for agile teams. 

Could a switch from CMMI-DEV to CMMI-SVC benefit agile teams?  Could a switch from CMMI-DEV to CMMI-SVC make achieving CMMI ratings easier and more meaningful?

I believe the answer to both is a resounding: ABSOLUTELY!

ATTENTION AGILE TEAMS: You need a CMMI rating?  Look at CMMI for Services.  It might just make your lives easier and actually deliver more value right now!

[NOTE: I have an essay, Are Services Agile?, in this book on this topic.  Since you can “look inside” you might be able to read it without buying it.  Furthermore, the essay has been published online in some places.  You might be able to find it out there.]

Posted in Agile, Business, CMMI for Services, Improvement, Kanban, Services, Services vs. Development | Comments Off

Services and Agility

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

I’ve been given several opportunities lately to be thinking about the relationship among product development, agility, and services.  In a recent conversation regarding (of all things) how to sample work for artifacts in a CMMI for Services appraisal, it became clear that taking a services view of development actually makes a lot of things more obvious when it comes to where and how to make performance improvements.

Furthermore, the idea that product development can be modeled as the organization of particular services – such that the culmination of all the services results in a product – not only enhances the understanding and performance of the development flow, but it also creates a strong affinity to agile management and development values, principles and practices.  In fact, a service-oriented development flow is how Kanban views and manages development, and even shares many parallels with traditional services such as “cumulative” work and flow.  And, seeing development as a flow of services simplifies if not eliminates the endless catch-22 of dealing with planning, resource allocation and work volume.

In the video, I was at the tail end of a week-long exposure to a very demanding product development and services delivery context: aboard a pleasure cruise ship.  At this stage of our family’s development, pleasure cruising has emerged as our vacation of choice so this was my sixth cruise in over 10 years.  The first three cruises were with three different cruise line companies and the most recent three were with the same line.  What struck me most about the ship’s (and this cruise company’s) operations were its flexibility and responsiveness to change.

Despite many constraints, within those constraints the ship was autonomous, and, the various departments within the ship had degrees of autonomy.  Beyond autonomy, there were clear components run centrally and just as clearly there were components that were decentralized.  But it all worked as a single service: the ship.  Within nearly every service were products to be developed, whether produced from scratch or recreated afresh over and over again.  Yet again, the massive, highly complex service system operated in an agile way by nearly any measure of ‘agility’ in nearly every facet of how it ran.

A few days after my return from the ship I had the opportunity to teach Introduction to CMMI.  This offering was to one of my clients and a guest.  All participants were sharp and involved – which isn’t always the case with such classes.  The class was special in that I was experimenting with new course material for the SEI in which I was delivering content from the CMMI for Development constellation following content from the CMMI for Services constellation.  This experience reinforced for me and exposed the participants to the strong relationship between Services and Development, the strong benefits of viewing development as a service (from both operational and improvement perspectives), and, helped my client (who uses Scrum, Kanban, and traditional development in various parts throughout the company) see common threads to help improve performance irrespective of how they approach management and development.

The learning for agile and CMMI cooperation may very well be found in services.  Think about it.  Now, class, discuss. ;-)

Posted in Agile, Autonomy, CMMI for Services, Improvement, Intro to CMMI, Kanban, Services, Services vs. Development, agility, flow, lean, learning, value | Comments Off