I learn so much from failure it’s hard to ignore the good that comes from it.

This week I parted company with a client long before their goals were reached.

Sadly, I knew from the start they would be a challenge and made the mistake of ignoring the warning signs.  Never again.  Honest!

This entry is as much for coaches and consultants as it is for teams, staff, management and leadership.

There are several tell-tale indicators of success and/or failure.  In our own ways and in their own contexts, experienced coaches and consultants know what these indicators are.  Well-rounded, experienced, and seasoned practitioners within companies know them too.  In fact, most people know them instinctively, somehow.  I can therefore safely say that whether it’s through experience or instinct, we all know many of the same indicators.  In fact, we can probably sum-up every indicator in one word: Attitude.

So, yes, Jeff Keller’s famous self-help book, "Attitude is Everything", applies as well.  In organizations, "attitude" is frequently interchangeable or encompassed by company "culture".  And yes, attitude is a derivative of culture.  But sometimes culture is harder to pinpoint than attitudes.  Attitude shows up in your interactions with the company from the very start of your prospecting dance.

Here are some attitudes you may encounter and whether or not they spell greater odds of success or failure:

Failure-prone attitudes:

• Hassling about price/cost/time but expecting the same scope and performance outcomes.
• Focusing on deadlines and schedules instead of real results.
• Not owning the work and expecting off-site outsiders to invent working approaches.
• Shallow goals that aren’t S.M.A.R.T.
• Mistaking a task for an outcome or goal.
• Ignoring, denying, and filtering information that indicates problems.
• Poor communication (which often starts with poor listening skills).
• No allocation of explicit time and/or resources to make improvements.
• Failing to recognize the importance of the right people in the right roles for the right reasons.
• Delivering materials for review with no lead-time for turn-around.
• Persisting in propagating bureaucratic policies despite the obvious lack of value-add.
• Executives who are mostly (if not exclusively) involved in decisions involving budgets but not in making changes.
• Repeatedly using external influences as excuses to not make important changes.
• Assuming a victimization attitude instead of owning up to their circumstances.
• Failure to learn and apply new ideas — even after being presented with the benefits of those ideas.
• Management by motivation 1.0 or 2.0

Success-leading attitudes:

• Focus on results not the cost of getting them.
• Clear, S.M.A.R.T. goals.
• Executive involvement and ownership of leading the changes.
• Respect and appreciation for everyone’s contribution and effort.
• Active concern for overtime, unplanned work, and defects.
• Accounting and planning for everything that takes time by everyone involved.
• Taking full ownership for all the work (irrespective of the “divisions of labor” as seen by the customers).
• Clear-eyed view of effort and not planning around "best case only" scenarios.
• Ability to appreciate the need for non-technical, non-managerial skills in the roles of leading change.
• Seeing beyond the surface: A desire to learn and understand the meaning behind the work, not just following the specific language of the work.
• Dealing with people as people and not numbers.

My best clients have always had direct, clear and unambiguous evidence of two things:

1. S.M.A.R.T. Goals, and
2. Executive involvement in making the changes happen — not just lip service and budget authorization.  This usually took the form of the top leader (or 1-step away) taking personal involvement in not just setting direction, but in working through the best way to make things happen with the people who will be most affected.  (What does NOT count is a “top” leader with a purely administrative role and no executive accountability or responsibility.)

In experiencing the failure with this client, I admit to learning about at least one critical oversight on my part (there were others but this one takes top spot).  As we were interviewing each other, I failed to interrogate the leaders of the company for specific improvement goals.  The only "goals" they came to me with was to make their processes "leaner" and to attain a CMMI Maturity Level 3 rating with leaner processes.  Which turned out to really mean little more than to replace their heavy-handed compliance-oriented approach with a set of processes more projects could comply with more easily.  Again, note that they were still about "compliance".

Despite claims to the contrary, I didn’t fully realize until well into the engagement that compliance was still their primary attitude — at least among the people who were charged with overseeing the process assets for the entire organization. 

During the engagement, I repeatedly worked to identify meaningful improvement goals that being "lean" could help them attain.  I then created a strategy that would bring them closer to these goals and presented it to the majority of the executives.

Despite wide agreement on the goals and the strategy, when it came to rolling out the necessary changes, it was met the same-old resistance to change and fears that I knew spelled doom.

Nonetheless, I had high hopes for this organization so I decided I would bring them around by modeling the behavior I was trying to help them see.  A few people caught on but, alas, not the people who held sway in the organization.  Our mutual falling-out began early when it became apparent that desire among the leadership to achieve a maturity rating without upsetting the apple cart was overshadowing the desire to actually reach the performance goals being a leaner organization would achieve.

Notwithstanding, there were other tell-tale signs from the list above that this organization didn’t have the attitude to make the changes necessary.  I won’t belabor you with the complete saga.  Instead, I’ll return to my point about this entry.
You as coaches, consultants, and staff can’t want to better than your leadership is prepared to be.  The signs are all around you.  Pay attention to the signs early.  You will save yourself a lot of time, heartache and frustration.  If you believe you don’t have enough experience to justify your powers of observation, then trust your instincts.  Is the organization defensive about their entrenched position on their circumstance?  Do they make excuses instead of setting goals?  Are the goals devoid of any real results? 

You don’t even have to go that far.  How are you treated as a person, as a professional, is about all you really need to know about whether or not there’s a hope that things can get better.  If you’re not appreciated, if your organization is willfully blind to the things that cause you grief, if you see signs that tell you the organization lacks "class", you don’t need 20 years of experience telling you you’re right to know you’re right.  This organization is doomed to mediocrity.  Is that the kind of organization you want to be associated with?

I don’t, and, I won’t ever be again.

Imagine what would happen if you went to a doctor (or any specialist) who had no experience in your specificcondition or situation.  Has this every happened to you?  It has to my family when I was young.  Let me tell you, it wasn’t pleasant.  What was frightening was that the “professional” didn’t know that they didn’t have the right experience.  What was just as bad was that my family didn’t have the knowledge or experience to know that the person we went to was not qualified.

This is a situation encountered by many organizations when seeking advice and/or appraisal services from a CMMI consultant / appraiser.  However, in business, you should at least know enough about your organization and ways of operating to do your homework before picking someone to help you with CMMI.

What you may not have known is that CMMI and the appraisal method are not as clear and obvious as other means of performance evaluation and that you must choose your consulting firm and appraiser very carefully, and among other factors, consider their contextually relevant experience. . . .

In this quote, CAPT Kirk wants Dr. Bones McCoy to do something he feels he’s not-qualified to do because he doesn’t know how to treat the species.

I’m using it to explain that organizations looking for a lead appraiser to work with them towards an appraisal and/or to perform an appraisal ought to think of what we do as they would think of a doctor, not a laborer or vendor.

Do you really want the lowest price doctor?

For that matter, is the highest price doctor necessarily the best in town?

When reaching out and interviewing for a lead appraiser or CMMI consultant, you:

• Want the person who is the right person for the job.
• Want someone who is qualified (definitely not under-, but preferably not over- either).
• Not the lowest bid.

Seriously, whoever you hire for this effort has in their power the ability to make or break your future.  They literally have the health and well-being of your organization in their hands.  They can put you in the dump just as easily as they can take you to the next level.

They should see themselves that way as well.

Unfortunately I’ve got too many sad stories of appraisers/consultants who definitely see that they can make or break you, but they don’t feel like they personally own the responsibility for what happens to you when they’re done.

If it costs too much?  So what?
If you get no value?  Not their problem.
Didn’t see any benefit?  Didn’t learn anything?  Things take longer and cost more and you’re not seeing internal efficiencies improve?
YOU must be doing something wrong, not them.

In an AgileCMMI approach, your CMMI consultant and/or lead appraiser would see themselves as and act like a coach, and would put lean processes and business value ahead of anything else.  And, an AgileCMMI approach would know that when the processes work, they add value; when they add value people like them and use them; when people like and use them, the next “level” is a big no-brainer-nothing.  You get it in your sleep.

Let me know if you want help finding the right lead appraiser or consultant.

A new Q &A have been added to the CMMIFAQ.
Answered is the not so trivial question: How do we pick a consultant or lead appraiser?

This question has come up a number of times. Not usually in such a straight-forward way. Actually, it often comes up in the form of something like:

Doesn’t the variation from lead appraiser to lead appraiser in model interpretation and what will be considered acceptable appraisal evidence make the model bereft of meaning and value?

It’s a legitimate question. How can a model really provide any guidance when there’s so much room for interpretation of the practices and what would be accepted as evidence by an appraiser during an appraisal?

Well, let’s go back to a basic and fundamental root: it’s a m o d e l not a standard or a process. (See this post, please, for more on that.)

And, as such, models are both incomplete and only representative of a particular reality, at best. Some people are just plain better at working with models than others. I’m beginning to believe it’s a talent. And, I’m not sure whether it’s a skill that can be taught — at least not quickly.

I’m still working on how to assess/interview a prospective consultant/lead appraiser for their “talent” at working with the CMMI model. The challenge for most organizations in need of a CMMI consultant/lead appraiser is that their knowledge and comfort level with the (CMMI) model may not be sufficient to recognize “good” answers from “poor” answers — in the context of the given organization, of course.

If you’ve got ideas, please let me know.

(Though… come to think of it… maybe that’s a handbook I ought to write!?)