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.

For more than the last 10 years I’ve been thinking a lot about CMMI.  Many of these thoughts have been ruminating on the ideas of how to incorporate CMMI in ways that add value, demonstrate effectiveness, and don’t disrupt the operation.  I’ve even opined much in this blog (in too many ways) on the need to know what your processes are before you can use CMMI to improve them, and that for many operations, CMMI isn’t even appropriate.

A few recent discussions and experiences put a particularly fine point on the extent to which CMMI is really the ‘cart before the horse’ when applied within an operation that has yet to clearly discern its process, and here’s why:

Most operations I’ve encountered are not ready to use CMMI because they are unclear on exactly how they make money.

Obviously, I’m not talking about the accounting process of billing out invoices and depositing checks.  And, I’m not even talking about the voodoo around figuring out how to ensure that internal costs (salaries, equipment, etc.) are less than what they charge clients for the work they do.

So, I must be talking about something more subtle.  I wish I were.  And, this is what’s both frightening and sad.  I’m merely talking about the relationship between capacity and demand.  For that matter, I’m not even worried much about demand, which is another matter.  I’m mostly talking about capacity.

What is capacity?

According to some, capacity is a measure of volume of work.  Throughput, for instance.  According to others, it’s the wherewithal to do the work.  Either way, too many operations don’t know what their capacity is. 

What does it actually take to get work done?  And, along with that, can it be reasonably expected of the operation to reliably and predictably continue to run how it runs (not knowing exactly how it runs) and to have any right to greater-than-zero confidence that they will continue to run as it does?

For one thing, many operations run outside of reasonable tolerances. In particular, people put in many many hours of unpaid over-time [in the US this is common for salaried employees].  This is an "out-of-tolerance" condition.  It is unreasonable to expect an operation’s greatest source of working knowledge to continue to work nights and weekends.  Furthermore, it is risky to do so.  One client said he couldn’t be away from the office for 5 minutes before product would stop shipping.  Eventually he will get married or his wife will have a child, or, heaven-forbid, he may take vacation! 

What’s worse is the extra time he and his team put in is entirely unaccounted-for.  His employer merely estimates, contracts, and bills enough to cover his and the team’s salaries, not what it actually takes to get work done.

Another reason true capacity is obscured is because more work going into the operation than there’s product (or services) coming out.  The most common cause of this is the misperception that work started = work completed, but this is an incomplete equation.  But a better equation to work with is work worked-on = work completed.  The key mistakes is the assumption that started = in-work.  That’s true for maybe 50% of the actual started work (often less).

This next reason for the lack of insight into true capacity (or capability, really) is that so many operations don’t account (either in their estimates — which sort-of makes sense — or in their capture of time-spent — which is unforgivable) for the time to correct defects, time to perform rework, time for paying-down technical debt, or time and effort to tracking-down the causes of defects and rework to avoid defects, rework, and technical debt in the first place!

I’ll end with one of the toughest, most sensitive observations of the last few months.  Some of my best clients (from the perspective of having their act together) have strong confidence in functional competence and, admittedly, weaker confidence in their programmatic credibility.  And, to put it plainly, by "programmatic" I mean their ability to have the same confidence in the rationale for their estimates and plans as they have in their ability to produce what their clients want. 

In these operations, I’ve found fundamental disconnects between how work is estimated and why clients should trust the technical competence of the operation.  In other words, they build trust with their prospects and clients on their ability to do the work and build the products, but in order to get the work in the first place they have to use a lot of hand-waving and breath-holding when it comes to their estimates.

A more-or-less summary way to describe all of this is as follows:

Most operations have Built a way of working that they’ve managed to Capitalize.  Over time, they’ve found that their Build*Capitalize approach is tough to Sustain.  Try that they might, whether it’s CMMI or something else, they’re looking to "fix" the equation on the "Sustain" side.  The problem is that CMMI *does* operate on the Sustain side, but the problems with the operation aren’t in the "Sustain", it’s that their approach to Capitalizing on what they Built is no longer Sustainable.  What needs to change is on the Build side.  Occasionally, there’s a need to revisit the Capitalize component, but most often it’s the Build that needs refactoring.

Hence, applying CMMI to an operation whose "build" is broken is putting the cart before the horse.  While it’s possible to build CMMI practices into the operation’s way of working, this is an activity of the "build" side of the equation, the sort I noted above contrasting from applying CMMI to the sustain side.  If CMMI is to be truly about improving the processes of the operation in a "sustaining" sort of way, and not defining them, the operation must understand what’s going on, and that means it must know its capacity.  Because unless it knows its capacity, it doesn’t really know what’s going on.

For more than the last 10 years I’ve been thinking a lot about CMMI. Many of these thoughts have been ruminating on the ideas of how to incorporate CMMI in ways that add value, demonstrate effectiveness, and don’t disrupt the operation. I’ve even opined much in this blog (in too many ways) on the need to know what your processes are before you can use CMMI to improve them, and that for many operations, CMMI isn’t even appropriate.

A few recent discussions and experiences put a particularly fine point on the extent to which CMMI is really the ‘cart before the horse’ when applied within an operation that has yet to clearly discern its process, and here’s why:

Most operations I’ve encountered are not ready to use CMMI because they are unclear on exactly how they make money.

Obviously, I’m not talking about the accounting process of billing out invoices and depositing checks. And, I’m not even talking about the voodoo around figuring out how to ensure that internal costs (salaries, equipment, etc.) are less than what they charge clients for the work they do.

So, I must be talking about something more subtle. I wish I were. And, this is what’s both frightening and sad. I’m merely talking about the relationship between capacity and demand. For that matter, I’m not even worried much about demand, which is another matter. I’m mostly talking about capacity.

What is capacity?

According to some, capacity is a measure of volume of work. Throughput, for instance. According to others, it’s the wherewithal to do the work. Either way, too many operations don’t know what their capacity is.

What does it actually take to get work done? And, along with that, can it be reasonably expected of the operation to reliably and predictably continue to run how it runs (not knowing exactly how it runs) and to have any right to greater-than-zero confidence that they will continue to run as it does?

For one thing, many operations run outside of reasonable tolerances. In particular, people put in many many hours of unpaid over-time [in the US this is common for salaried employees]. This is an “out-of-tolerance” condition. It is unreasonable to expect an operation’s greatest source of working knowledge to continue to work nights and weekends. Furthermore, it is risky to do so. One client said he couldn’t be away from the office for 5 minutes before product would stop shipping. Eventually he will get married or his wife will have a child, or, heaven-forbid, he may take vacation!

What’s worse is the extra time he and his team put in is entirely unaccounted-for. His employer merely estimates, contracts, and bills enough to cover his and the team’s salaries, not what it actually takes to get work done.

Another reason true capacity is obscured is because more work going into the operation than there’s product (or services) coming out. The most common cause of this is the misperception that work started = work completed, but this is an incomplete equation. But a better equation to work with is work worked-on = work completed. The key mistakes is the assumption that started = in-work. That’s true for maybe 50% of the actual started work (often less).

This next reason for the lack of insight into true capacity (or capability, really) is that so many operations don’t account (either in their estimates — which sort-of makes sense — or in their capture of time-spent — which is unforgivable) for the time to correct defects, time to perform rework, time for paying-down technical debt, or time and effort to tracking-down the causes of defects and rework to avoid defects, rework, and technical debt in the first place!

I’ll end with one of the toughest, most sensitive observations of the last few months. Some of my best clients (from the perspective of having their act together) have strong confidence in functional competence and, admittedly, weaker confidence in their programmatic credibility. And, to put it plainly, by “programmatic” I mean their ability to have the same confidence in the rationale for their estimates and plans as they have in their ability to produce what their clients want.

In these operations, I’ve found fundamental disconnects between how work is estimated and why clients should trust the technical competence of the operation. In other words, they build trust with their prospects and clients on their ability to do the work and build the products, but in order to get the work in the first place they have to use a lot of hand-waving and breath-holding when it comes to their estimates.

A more-or-less summary way to describe all of this is as follows:

Most operations have Built a way of working that they’ve managed to Capitalize. Over time, they’ve found that their Build*Capitalize approach is tough to Sustain. Try that they might, whether it’s CMMI or something else, they’re looking to “fix” the equation on the “Sustain” side. The problem is that CMMI *does* operate on the Sustain side, but the problems with the operation aren’t in the “Sustain”, it’s that their approach to Capitalizing on what they Built is no longer Sustainable. What needs to change is on the Build side. Occasionally, there’s a need to revisit the Capitalize component, but most often it’s the Build that needs refactoring.

Hence, applying CMMI to an operation whose “build” is broken is putting the cart before the horse. While it’s possible to build CMMI practices into the operation’s way of working, this is an activity of the “build” side of the equation, the sort I noted above contrasting from applying CMMI to the sustain side. If CMMI is to be truly about improving the processes of the operation in a “sustaining” sort of way, and not defining them, the operation must understand what’s going on, and that means it must know its capacity. Because unless it knows its capacity, it doesn’t really know what’s going on.

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.

Munich.  Refreshing!  That’s the word I’d use to summarize what I’ve experienced here this week.  By far, compared to similar conferences in the US, the most noticeable difference between the attendees here and elsewhere is that among the attendees here, they share an earnest desire to use CMMI to improve!  To dig into the model, reach beyond the descriptions of "levels" and really look at what they need to do to improve.  Really, improve.  

Much of the "refreshment" came from the keynotes, actually.  Not that sessions I attended weren’t inconsistent with my observations, but the keynotes contained substance.

Everything from an exposé on policies that really zeroes-in on understanding their role in organizations, to ways in which traditional "need to know what this will cost and when it will be done" can be achieved on agile projects using, of all things, Earned Value and Function Points!

Among the keynotes (and others) were some very impressive explanations of exactly how process improvement (and CMMI, in particular) are necessary strategic assets that enable corporate goals.  How CMMI helps an organization satisfy and demonstrate it complies with external and internal standards.  How CMMI is helping an 1000+ person [yet still entrepreneurial] organization (that started as 13 people in 1999 and continues to grow @ a rate of 40 engineers/month worldwide) establish their organizational level capability to support frequent re-orgs (due to growth), international expansion, adapt new business goals, and introduce new regulatory and compliance standards.

There was even a session by a company who is forced, by contract, to reduce costs (or increase throughput) 10% per year or lose a multi-year multi-million USD contract.  And, of course, they were using CMMI (at ML5!) to do it and they explained how.

I’ve got blog materials for months!

But I’ll leave you with a few gems from Watts Humphrey himself:

• Requirements ALWAYS change.
• Time and Schedules are ALWAYS aggressive.
• Resources will ALWAYS be tight.

These are the realities of technology projects.  You need a process that can address these realities and adapt to change.  A process that expects perfect requirements, plenty of time, and more than enough resources is a process destined to fail.

This, from the man many blame for coming up with "the worst thing that has ever happened to software."

Is it not clear yet folks that it’s not CMMI that’s the problem, just CMMI in the wrong hands, that’s the problem?

SEPG-Europe helped validate for me I’m not nuts.  Here are a few hundred people who really want to make things better.  From my visit at Seimens and my meal with the local Scrum users group, to all the folks I met and heard at the conference.  What it spells is this:  those who take processes seriously are preparing to take business away from those who don’t and keep it for a long time.

I get common resistance from agile proponents that part of the agile philosophy is to only perform activities that add value to the product, and thereby (the assumption is) to the client. This is often a stumbling block for the "lean" folks too.

The argument goes along the lines of: much of the CMMI practices to "maintain" and even many of the practices to "establish" certain work items don’t add value. If not, why do them?

It’s a strong case. But strong cases for not doing practices don’t make for organizations that can get through a SCAMPI (CMMI appraisal) and end with a maturity level rating.^*

So what is there for an organization to do?

There are two ways (non-exhaustive and not mutually exclusive) to re-factor this thinking, both of which involve adding long-term value in addition to immediate value:

1) Adding value to the organization, and
2) Adding value to the future product (or, to the product in the future).

In the first approach, process activities are seen as adding value beyond the immediate project. Process activities are seen as an investment in the efficiency and productivity of future projects. And, on sufficiently long projects, these activities can provide feedback in time to make a difference to the projects underway and from which the process data is being collected. This approach adds value to the business in terms of know-how, intellectual property and competitive edge.

The second approach, while similar to the first is product-focused. In this view, the value in doing the process activities is in being able to reduce maintenance costs, make updates/upgrades less cumbersome or expensive and make the product more extensible. This often goes handily with allowing the developer to be different from the operator, the maintainer, or the help desk.

Many paradigms of process improvement use the metaphor of "throwing the product over the wall" as a means to describe what happens when products are developed in a serial, production-line fashion and not as an integrated, high-trust, highly communicative team (sound familiar?). The very antithesis of agile development.

Well, here’s a wake-up call for some people, including self-proclaimed agile developers: the "wall" eliminated by integrated and agile development teams is not only between steps in the development life cycle. Sometimes the wall that needs eliminating is temporal. That is, stop throwing your well-tested, peer-reviewed, non-wasteful code over the wall for someone in the future to have to deal with. Most of us have had to make sense of someone else’s spaghetti code at one point or another and we shouldn’t be the ones to create it even if we did so by being lean and agile today while sacrificing the value of the product in the future.

So, the value we’re trying to eek out of our process activities ought to take this sort of long-term view of "value" Some also refer to this as "Total Cost of Ownership" or TCO. Process activities ought to be calculated on the basis of TCO for the organization and the product.

In both approaches, the value being added to the organization as well as to the product is a reduction in waste. Companies don’t become lean over night and they don’t become great at agile practices with 2 days of stand-up meetings or one 30 day sprint. Often taking the time to identify, record, be methodical about, and update the organization’s approaches can help find what works and eliminate what doesn’t.

Really…. CMMI isn’t what complicates this, it’s not understanding CMMI that owns that job.

^* Let’s be clear about something… Achieving a maturity level (or capability level) rating should not be any organization’s goal. Improvement should be. PLENTY of benefit, value and improvement can be had without *ever* being appraised and/or without ever attaining a "level" rating. However, for obvious reasons, achieving ratings has other value, such as being able to compete for certain customers and in certain markets.