Archive for the ‘value’ Category

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. ;-)

Blaming CMMI is just another symptom … of LCPBCs

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

Stop blaming CMMI for bad processes.  Stop blaming CMMI for not getting real value from performance improvement efforts.  Used correctly, CMMI fixes processes, doesn’t make bad processes.  Bad processes are a symptom of using CMMI incorrectly and blaming CMMI is to run away from the true issues.  The true issues are that the organization/company doesn’t have a culture to support high performance results long before anyone thought to use CMMI.

This is most typical of level-chasing pathological box-checkers who want ratings at any expense to effectiveness, morale or efficiency.

You can always tell these types of organizations from those who truly want to improve.  Level-chasing pathological box-checkers (LCPBCs) don’t know what their own processes are, and when they start to look they don’t like what they see but refuse to do anything progressive about their ineffective, inefficient, and otherwise broken processes.  LCPBCs often rule by fear in one form or another; they don’t practice TQM, don’t employ Lean principles, don’t value when people challenge the status quo, don’t value the expertise of people not in powerful positions, and don’t empower their people to make decisions or to take responsibility for the entirety of the health and well-being of the organization.  LCPBCs are also easily picked out of a crowd by their belief that you can improve performance without changing anything difficult and by limiting whatever changes might happen to the technical staff alone.  You’ll often find them hunting for “CMMI in a box” (or even “agile in a box”) and they’re looking to do it cheap, fast, and start “right now!”.

True, that some executives are LCPBCs because they don’t know any better, but there’s hope for those executives who are interested in making informed decisions.  Others are doomed to low returns and continued recurring process (and appraisal) costs.  Slapping CMMI on top of such a discordant, caustic, corroded, and sick culture will only make things worse.  And, blaming CMMI for failures to produce advertised outcomes, or for costing time and money and adding no value is just another symptom of the problems that existed in such organizations before CMMI was ever introduced.

Blaming CMMI is just the latest cop-out excuse in what’s likely a long list of excuses for the organization’s failures to materialize success –
It’s not CMMI … it’s immature, unreliable, culturally caustic organizations being exposed by the dust the CMMI stirs up.

Next time: How to not be a LCPBC: Making the marriage of CMMI and Agile a no-brainer.

SEPG North America – Tutorial Day

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

So today started out with a bus ride from the hotel to the Savannah International Trade and Convention Center rather than the expected ferry ride over the river.  A container ship in the port managed to get damaged and leaked fuel into the Savannah River on Sunday immediately closing the river to non-clean-up traffic, including the otherwise convenient cross-river ferry.

Be that as it may, the bus ride gave me an opportunity to connect with Michele Moss from Booz-Allen, Hamilton.  A kindred spirit in things related to "the future of process".  She and I had plans to meet anyway some time today to discuss ideas about "bringing ‘younger people’ into the field" and a related topic, addressing modern-day issues such as cyber, agile and value as these concerns are manifested in processes and process improvement.

First order of the day after registration was to co-create what I perceived as a rather successful (and well-attended) tutorial with Judah Mogilensky on a tailoring for SCAMPI appraisals that increases efficiency, collaboration, and reduces time and cost, we called "One-Stop Shopping".  Immediately following, Michele and I met with Bob Rosenstein, the events and conferences manager at SEI.  David Anderson, just arriving to the venue, was a very beneficial addition to the discussion, conveying his experience with creating communities and conferences specific to a community such as his LSSCDana Hanzlik and Danny Pipitone from SEI’s PR group also sat in on the conversation.  About the only definitive expectation to come out of this meeting (other than our commitment to come to the retrospective with with data from the Peer-to-Peer), was that SEI will be open to more closely tying into other gatherings.  Not bad since we had no expectations going in, and, even if we had, it wouldn’t have been reasonable to have expected any commitments.

Much came up in just under an hour with Bob.  We’re planning to include bits of this topic in our end-of-conference committee retrospective on Thursday.  Part of what will feed into that retrospective will be a Peer-to-Peer session on Wednesday afternoon that Michele and I will be co-creating and was planned with David’s help.  Our Peer-to-Peer is being billed as, "Where do we go from here? Value, Agile, Cyber, and all things Future Processes."

The mind-map of the problem-space was really intriguing.  This will not be an easy matter.

After a conference lunch with David and Michele, we split up and I attended the invitation-only advanced overview of the changes to "high maturity" to CMMI v1.3.  Good stuff, really.  Way too geek for here.

After getting as much as I cared to get from the high maturity campfire (which coincided with the moment I sensed my lunch moved far enough down my digestive tract to make room (literally) for a run) I decided to go back to my hotel to squeeze a run in before the evening gorge-fest that includes the opening of the trade-show floor, a board meeting, and later, a surprise opportunity to attend a special reception, all of which were to include food (and in order of continually improving quality at that).

Before I could get back across the river, I nabbed an opportunity to comment on a frequent occurrence here, on the Savannah River:

Several lovely hours later of socializing (albeit, mostly work-related) I’m back at the room planning my day ahead.