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”.

What’s CMMI all about?

Well, instead of getting into CMMI itself, let’s look at what CMMI is really doing.

CMMI has a:
1) Purpose
2) Method
3) Mode/Means

Purpose
The Purpose of CMMI is to improve processes to facilitate organizations’ abilities to deliver product on time (schedule), within budget (cost) and that does what it’s supposed to do (quality/functionality).

The authors of the CMMI found a set of practices that, when performed, has a consistently positive effect on Schedule, Cost and Quality/Functionality. Furthermore, they found that these values can be further improved and optimized by being able to pinpoint controllable variables and apply quantitative analysis on those variables to tweak what affects them.

Method
The Method CMMI uses is one of graduated institutionalization. The graduated approach towards institutionalizing processes starts with simply performing process improvement practices without much by way of managing and organization. The next step moves up into planning and providing resources, training, and controlling the output and checking the results of the processes. After that, further institutionalization includes creating consistent practices across projects, collecting feedback about the processes then finally graduating towards statistical controls, predictive analysis and removing causes of inconsistencies.

Mode/Means
If nothing else, an unspoken theme throughout CMMI is that of Communication.
How *any* of the practices work is that they facilitate communication because they require communication in order to work and won’t work without it. However, communication isn’t just project participants talking to one another. Communication also includes communication for the benefit of those from whom we need some action to be taken as well as for the benefit of those that follow us.

In other words, it’s not just organizational (vertical and horizontal) communication, it’s also temporal communication. In order to effectively bridge the temporal (as well as sometimes the organizational) communication, practices that improve processes need to be conveyed in a manner that withstands situational and temporary circumstances.

Situational and Temporary circumstances are a fancy way of pointing out that relying on individuals to pass project legacy and lore from person to person will quickly break down under the pressure and influence of time, environments, and personalities. Artifacts (not necessarily ‘documentation’) are how we bridge the temporal communication issue while also benefiting the organizational challenges in communicating what we need, what we did, what we’re doing, and the ‘why’ of it all.

While the need to communicate face-to-face is essential in every successful project, it can’t be the only way we communicate on longer-term projects or across distances. Neither can it be the only means of communication even on short projects where the product outlasts the development organization by many times over. There are many ways to create artifacts, some are more time-consuming and less valuable than others, but the need to create them comes from the need to facilitate broad communication that extends beyond simply face-to-face.

Lastly, practices that rely solely on face-to-face communication, without the benefit of some procedures is definitionally an ‘ad hoc’ process, and, is at the lowest level of institutionalization. This isn’t to say that they are ineffective, but simply that they are not institutionalized and therefore are unlikely to persist from project to project. Finding the abstraction for a practice that can both persist from project to project while also being re-structured to meet the differing needs of each project is not only what makes Agile approaches to CMMI possible, but also corresponds directly with what one does when graduating their practices from one level of institutionalization to the next.

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?