Want fast, easy CMMI ratings?  Even high maturity?

First, implement lean, Goldratt’s TOC, Deming’s ideas, Kanban, and other related concepts, then get busy with CMMI.

What you may not know is that lean is easier, faster, and generates better performance results sooner than CMMI.

Lean improves delivery issues sooner than process improvement alone.  Improved deliveries improves revenues, stabilizes cash flow, increases margin, makes customers happier and results in more sales.

In other words, lean means better flow and better flow means better business.

CMMI is great, but is often attempted as a first line of offense to issues it’s not meant to deal with.  CMMI is meant to improve flow, not define it, and, lean helps define flow.
(Yes, I know I said "theory of constraints" twice.)

Assuming there are unfulfilled orders in the sales pipeline, lack of revenue is due to lack of flow.  Typically, this is due more to what’s in the flow, how much is in it, and the clarity and cleanliness of how the operation’s flow is aligned.  Using CMMI to "fix" issues with flow is like using the Brownian motion of steeping tea to power a random-number generator.  It’s just too much too soon.  Process issues are themselves symptoms of flow issues.

Deal with the symptoms first.  Then, tackle the processes.

Two events to put on your radar:

Lean Software and Systems Conference: Boston, 13-18 May (Lean Camp & Lean Action Kitchen, Sunday, Conference Monday-Wednesday, and Tutorials Thursday & Friday).  I’m helping to organize and speaking at the conference, and running a tutorial on this topic on Thursday.

Kanban Change Agent Masterclass: Miami, 23-25 May.  I’ll be participating as a special guest to demonstrate how Kanban helps achieve CMMI ratings, including High Maturity.

I’m speaking @ the Lean Software and Systems Conference 2011.

The program is amazing!

I highly encourage attendance.

There’s an entire day in cooperation with the SEI with 3 unique tracks on it including a track on CMMI and Multi-Modal Processes (which I’m chairing).

Take a look at my talk… it’s from my upcoming book: High Performance Operations.

Register quickly and make your hotel reservations! Block rooms are nearly gone!

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.

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. 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.

I’ll start out with observations I noted each week since starting this ridiculous journey.  I wrote these as I went along.  I only edited it for formatting, grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.  You may see an evolution of thoughts and lessons.  I’ll end with the performance outcome from the first month.

WEEK 1

- Don’t try to get calories perfect.  Expect calories to be approximate.  Aim for perfect, be content with +/- 20%.

- It is very hard to get an accurate accounting of calories, let alone an accounting of all them.  If you try to be "perfect" about it, it would be very easy to get discouraged and to allow the discouragement to become self-defeating.  Keep in mind, it’s all data, and we’re looking for trends, correlation and causalities.  If it could be perfect, this exercise would not have become (or would ever be) necessary.

- Be careful with food labels.  The total calories FREQUENTLY doesn’t add up from the sum of the parts.  Typically, the total on the label is LESS than if you calculate

Calories = Fat[g]*9[cal/g] + Carb[g]*4[cal/g] + Protein[g}*4[cal/g] based on the individual parts.

- Weigh as often as you can (thanks @erwilleke).  At one point this week I was down more than 4lbs, but at the prescribed weighing, I was only down 1lb.  I know that at the prescribed weigh-in time, I was still carrying a number of days of b/m.  Had it not been for the earlier mid-week weigh-ins, I might’ve been discouraged even knowing that I was heavier than I would have been had I expelled my waste.  I must get to "regularity" — need to drink more of things that aren’t dehydrating me.

- Make friends with various nutrition/energy bar supplements.  Chosen wisely, they’re great for energy, fiber, and a sweet-tooth or dessert.  Also, properly selected, they’re great to keep the metabolism going between main meals as well as to stave off being too hungry at meals.  (You don’t want to ever be ’starving’ at a meal.  bad idea.  In case you were wondering, I’ve learned you want to be eating at least 200-300 calories every 2-3 hours.  If you find yourself ’starving’, you’re better off eating something "bad" (like a small candy-bar or other snack) for 100-200 calories to prevent being ravenous at a meal.)

WEEK 2

- Try even less to get the calories perfect.  Seriously, it’s not going to happen, and it turns out, it’s not the point really.

- Good solid healthy meals don’t have to have a lot of calories, but you’re probably going to have to make them yourself. 
Ex: eggs/omelettes for breakfast, without lots (or any) cheese, low-fat wraps, load-up with vegetables.

- Keep salad around A LOT and make your own dressing.

- You can probably walk on a treadmill every day and not hurt yourself.  In fact, you’ll probably benefit from doing so as your body gets used to it and doesn’t stiffen back up.  Recent studies are even showing that, for example, 3 intense 10 minute work-outs spread out along a day are probably as good (or better) for you as one 30-minute work out.  I haven’t tried that approach yet.  Not sure I’ll get to it.

- Drink a lot.  Especially things that don’t have much caffeine.  Keep water around.  Don’t let yourself get too thirsty or you’ll drink whatever’s within reach and that can also end up being garbage for you.  Otherwise, you’ll (a) think you’re hungry, and (b) get ’stopped up’ — if you know what I mean.

- This week included/ended with Thanksgiving weekend and the start of week 3 included a trip to the Raven’s game (i.e., Tailgating)

- Weight drop from week 1 returned (mostly) and working it off wasn’t working.  Very bummed but surprisingly determined nonetheless.  Re-thinking my strategy.

- I perceive that my b/m aren’t regular and that I may be quartering excess unevacuated waste — leading to weight gain/plain this week.

WEEK 3

- Despite a tailgate and several unaccounted meals all weekend since Thanksgiving, Monday AM weigh-in was more than Sunday but still under the starting weight.

- Dropping target caloric intake to 2000 calories starting Monday had an immediate effect.  Started losing 1+#/day immediately.
- Keeping to 2000 cal/day seems easier than 2400 for some reason.  Suspect the increased calories further increases appetite.  Thinking there’s a metabolic tipping point for me somewhere between 2000 and 2400 calories.

- Finding a number of high-ROC (return on calories) meals.  Most of which include Amylou’s chicken sausages, Morningstar Farms breakfast patties or "Egg Beaters".  Filling, satisfying and YUMM!

- Have generally not been counting slow carbs from vegis in my caloric calculations, or skim milk in my coffee.  Do count dressing, fatty additives and cream if used.

- When calorie counting is impractical, I’m using the "3 hand plate" rule, aka, the "Fat Loss Plate".  I’m also keen to avoid obvious starches when not able to account for calories.

- I honestly don’t feel deprived despite several days of significantly low caloric consumption.

WEEK 4

- 2000 cal/day FTW!  Weight moving nicely in the right direction.

- Tracking calories has made it easy to associate meals, dishes, and portion sizes to their respective caloric impact.  Just goes to show you how measures have a benefit beyond what the data tells you, but that you can make associations with measures to other (performance) parameters to help guide decision-making even in the absence of precise data.

- Worry *EVEN LESS* about calories being perfectly counted.  Shooting for 80% weekly.  With the observations on caloric impact of various dishes, meals, and portion sizes, it’s actually becoming easier to worry less about the science and more about observation.

- Caloric impact observations together with tracking the calories have also made it FAR easier to take note of how much food is necessary before being full — this makes it easier to stop eating when no longer hungry, to allow tempting foods to just sit there, to be satisfied with less than what might otherwise seem like a reasonable portion, and to be more attentive to when I’m truly hungry, and what I’m hungry for.  Ex: If I know that a meal made from veggie breakfast patties, sliced veggies and hearty bread is filling, satisfying for H hours and consumes C calories, not only have I learned what a satisfying meal looks like, but also what it does/doesn’t have to include in order to be satisfying as well as the calories involved.

- I’ve gone through the spreadsheet and started (where possible) to calculate daily % of Fat, Carbs, and Protein.  NOT EASY to keep to a 40/30/30 balance.

The benefit (and importance) of being regular
(I’m talking about process stability what were you thinking about?):

Without it you have no idea WHAT you’re capable of.  It would have been nearly impossible for me to get any idea whatsoever of my caloric profile without the several weeks of mostly uniform and nearly ideal conditions I’m experiencing in which to collect measures that I can use when things aren’t uniform, ideal, or stable. 
This point can’t be over-emphasized. 

Had I been on travel these last 5 weeks, this entire venture would have likely been a frustrating exercise.  Without the ability to measure most of my meals, with the ability to pay close attention to my appetite, or to exercise regularly, or have any idea/control over what’s in what I eat, I’d NEVER be able to get to a point where I can be comfortable not measuring, not worrying, not bouncing from extreme to extreme — unknowingly.

With just a few weeks of data I am confident I can enjoy treats and snacks without dumping all my work down the toilet.  Does this mean I can wantonly, indiscriminately eat junk all the time?  No.  There’s never a time when anyone can do that and not pay for it some how.  But it does mean that I can go to a wine tasting and enjoy wines and cheese and snacks and desserts and not worry about it.  Why not?  Because by the time I attended the wine tasting, I had weeks of data to train me in how much I need to eat to be satisfied, how much I can eat before over-eating, and how many calories are in certain foods as a function of food type and visual size.  And, that doesn’t even account for the fact that prior to attending the event, I knew how many calories I’d eaten and how many more calories I could still consume and still be in my target range for best results.  In other words, I could operate without the constant data gathering and now use the data I gathered to quantitatively manage my efforts.

Your processes must be clearly understood.  You must be able to operate them while accounting for the variables that affect them.  Merely measuring results (weight, for example) without the underlying processes is what you’re doing when you measure the performance side only and don’t know the variables going into that performance.

The performance of my bottom (line)

Here’s what I said I’d do when I started a month ago, alongside what I actually did…

Planned:  I plan to eat no more than 2400 calories/day, up to 6 "meals" or snacks per day.
Actual:  I started out at 2400 and dropped to 2000 after 2 weeks.  After changing to 2000 calories max, I wasn’t as good at eating 6 meals/day because I didn’t want to exceed the upper limit.  Interestingly, I wasn’t as hungry on fewer calories.  But 6 meals/day is something I want to do, so I’ll be working on it going forward.

Planned:  I plan to exercise a minimum of 5 days/week.
Actual: During this reporting period I worked out at least 6 days/week.

Planned:  I plan to weigh myself once/week.
Actual:  As noted earlier, I’m weighing-in more often.

Planned: I plan to measure my clothes size measurements once/month.
Actual: Did that.  Summary below.

So, how’d I do?

In the first sixth of my effort, I’ve lost about 25% of my goal weight.  I don’t expect this pace to continue much longer, but it’s nice anyway.

I’ve lost a surprising 0.5" in neck size, and 1"+ in chest, waist, and hips each.  Also a surprise was losing over an inch in my thigh.  I’m not sure whether that might be a function of where I measured, so I took more specific note of where I measured to make sure I’ll measure there again next month.

Overall, I’m very pleased.

See you next month.

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.

Well, I’d like to say it was "nothing", but really, I was sweating bullets!

Since I consider readers of this blog to be among my more friendly professional acquaintances, I thought I’d let you in on something that has not yet been released to the general public.

See here for an as-yet to be released announcement article/press-release-style about my becoming an SEI-Certified High Maturity Lead Appraiser.

The actual release might change slightly as the PR folks work on it, but you’ll get the gist.

One fun thing that had to be left on the editing floor was a quote from a technical member of one of my client’s staff when he asked, "… how did you get into this field?  I mean, you actually have a personality!"

The techie was worried I might be offended, but I thought it was pretty funny, and so did PR… but it didn’t make the cut for the article.

Here’s some insight into what it was like:

The oral exam gives high marks for noting very specific terms, and is structured in some way (like the CMMI model itself) that lends itself to recursiveness (not exactly redundancy).  Towards the last half hour, my seasonal cold, my lack of sleep, and my indigestion had all caught-up with me.  My brain was empty, I couldn’t tell what I’d said previously and what I still didn’t say and I couldn’t pull certain ideas from my brain to save my life.

Last impressions are often just as memorable as first impressions.  In my case, I recall that I nailed the earlier parts of the exam to the wall.  Not just hitting the target but obliterating it.  But when the end drew near, I felt like I’d lost that clarity of thought, that I was going in circles.  Not knowing when I’d said enough or when I was digging my own grave, I started searching for ideas on the blank neutral hotel walls hoping my eye-movement would stimulate new recollections to re-open my log-jammed head to what I knew I knew.

At best, I felt I was squarely on the fence.  I’m grateful to the guys who administered the exam for translating my verbal spaghetti into thoughts that must’ve communicated my intentions even though at the time I felt my 22-month old had more effective speech patterns.

Just a quick word about Agile & “High Maturity” or “High Capability” practices:

I’m currently visiting the SEI for their Understanding CMMI High Maturity Practices class (since I already understand the concepts, I’m mostly taking it to force me to spend a lot more time with the actual model language than I’d do left to my own devices — and to satisfy certain certification requirements).

One thing I would like to report, since I haven’t pointed it out before, is that agile methods have a serious advantage over non-agile or “traditional” methods when it comes to the High Maturity and Capability practices.

Specifically, Agile’s predisposition to project retrospectives, progress metrics (velocity, etc.) and continual re-planning all lend themselves to having various measures collected, analyzed, and the results worked back into the next iteration or project. Obviously, there must be value to doing so, and even so, doing it should be as automated as possible. But for agile teams working in larger organizations with a process-oriented infrastructure (think: agile team w/in a defense contractor), such a team could get to, sustain and appraise for high maturity or capability levels long before and without nearly as much change or pain as their non-agile co-habitating projects.

For an explanation of what high maturity practices are, please refer to here and look for process areas with an “ML4″ or “ML5″ following the name.
For an explanation of what high capability practices are, please refer to here and look for the goals and practices beginning with “GG4/GP4″ or “GG5/GP5″. You might notice familiar language to the above link.