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Summary
Summary
Praise for CMMI® Survival Guide
"Traveling down the CMMI road can be difficult and time-consuming. Garcia and Turner have given us a practical roadmap that addresses the key points to learn as well as the many potholes to avoid. Their Survival Guide is a most valuable resource for the journey. It will help immeasurably in achieving the process improvement that you seek."
--Dr. Howard Eisner, Distinguished Research Professor, George Washington University
"Helps you get to the ''red meat'' of the CMMI quickly and with minimum pain."
--Donald J. Reifer, President, Reifer Consultants, Inc.
"The best words I can offer potential readers is that you must have this book, not on your shelf, but with you for repeated reading to glean new ideas or reinforce old ones you gained from the past readings. If you have ever been directly involved in a process improvement initiative or if you are starting one, this book can only help you to do a better job. And while [the authors] may not have written this book explicitly for experienced consultants, I found it a great reference even for those of us who helped start this industry, because it provides clear and useful answers to those tough questions we are asked all of the time."
--Tim Kasse, CEO and Principal Consultant, Kasse Initiatives LLC
"This book contains practical (working) tips for the ''getting started'' phase of process improvement, which is the hardest one in the road to improving one''s processes."
--Agapi Svolou, Principal of Alexanna, LLC, and SEI CMMI Transition Partner
"The authors have done an outstanding job in providing guidance for process improvement from a practical perspective. Instead of focusing on a single technique or approach, they have provided a variety of methods for process improvement implementation and have framed their discussion with rich context from lessons learned. The concepts described in this book will be useful to both those starting CMMI implementations and to those who are well into their journey but are still looking for ways to lessen the pain and provide value-added improvements. Reading the book is like being in the audience during a live presentation by SuZ and Rich--they wrote the book as they would present the information to a live audience."
--Bill Craig, Director, Software Engineering Directorate, AMRDEC, RDECOM
"I have been involved in process improvement since the early 90''s and many of the mistakes that I made could have been prevented if this book had been available then."
--Claude Y. Laporte, Professor, ETS Universite du Quebec"Primarily, the book is practical. The guidance presented is geared toward someone who is not exactly sure why they need process improvement, but is presented with the fact that they must do it. Very often these are smaller organizations, with limited resources, and uncertain support from above. As I read the book, I thought almost immediately of a couple of organizations with which I am familiar who could use this kind of tutelage. There are real, and useful, techniques in this book that I believe can help these kinds of organizations prioritize and establish reasonable plans for improving the processes in the organization. I also like the sidebars and personal observations. Discussions of experience can really help organizations through the various pitfalls that are part of developing and deploying processes. It makes the book more of a ''real life'' guide, and not a theoretical exercise. Finally, the book is an enjoyable read. The conversational style of the book (and the humor) make it much easier to read than many of the books I have read in the past."
--Alexander Stall, Principal Process Improvement Engineer, Systems and Software Consortium
The CMMI provides a framework for process improvement spanning the life cycle of a product or service, from conception through delivery and maintenance. Widely and beneficially adopted around the world, the size and apparent complexity of the framework have nonetheless been daunting to some organizations. That need not be so. With a proper guide to help navigate around unknown dangers, potential pitfalls, and false paths, you too, can realize substantial business value from a successful CMMI implementation. This book is such a guide, full of the real-life examples to ease your way, and written in a lighter style to ease your reading.
The CMMI® Survival Guide is an effective resource for multiple readerships. If you are just now considering a process improvement program, with the CMMI among your options, the authors'' discussion of relevant issues will enhance your business case right from the start. If you have already decided to implement the CMMI, the authors'' practical knowledge will help you make the most of your efforts. Even if you are well into a CMMI implementation, but are lost, stuck, or going around in circles, the authors'' valuable advice will help you regain your direction.
If you work in a smaller or resource-strapped organization, you will particularly benefit from the authors'' description of alternative paths to process improvement--approaches that are more incremental or agile, and less intensive, than you might imagine for a CMMI implementation. The authors draw on their extensive experience working with diverse organizations, and on the CMMI tools, techniques, and templates developed for those organizations.
Whatever your background or need, the CMMI® Survival Guide will help you survey the CMMI territory, consult possible road maps, learn from other CMMI explorers, weigh the benefits of hiring a living guide, and even consider whether the trip is right for you.
Author Notes
Suzanne (SuZ) Garcia is a senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University
Excerpts
Excerpts
Adopting CMMI (or any other process improvement initiative) can seem like navigating a jungle full of unknown dangers, pitfalls, and false paths. No matter where you are in your process improvement journey, there are a lot of reasons why you might need a CMMI survival guide. If you are just starting out, you'll need to survey the territory, consult maps, talk to other explorers, look into hiring guides, and maybe reconsider whether you really need to take that trip after all. If you are already committed, but feel like you're lost or stuck or going around in circles, your outlook may be reduced to simple survival. On the other hand, if you have begun to see past the dangers and into the pos*sibilities, you may want some additional tools and techniques to get the most out of your journey. For all of you, we are pleased to present this compendium of knowledge and experience about the process improvement jungle in the hope that it can make your trip more efficient, valuable, and satisfying. We have three goals for this volume: We'd like to calm the nervous, help the little guy, and make process improvement more agile. Let's look at each of these. Calming the nervous We've heard lots of nervous concerns about CMMI. It's as though Dante's "Abandon all hope ye who enter here" somehow were added to the CMMI shingle. Consider (if you will) the following common perceptions about CMMI: CMMI is big and intimidating. Who wants to wade through a 700-page-plus book to try to understand it? Our choose one: customer/acquiring company/prime told us we have to use it. We thought we were immune to process improvement because we don't build software. Now they tell us CMMI applies to us. It costs so much to implement. We don't have that kind of overhead funding available. It seems to take such a long time before return on investment is achieved. It was written by and for large, government-driven businesses. It can't possibly be useful--or usable--for small companies and organizations or limited projects. We want to be agile, and CMMI is ueber-high ceremony. We'll wait until it's absolutely, positively unavoidable--and then we'll bite the bullet and buy our way in. Fortunately, most of this anxiety is based on misperceptions rising from a somewhat old-fashioned, traditional role for process improvement. While we can't counter every fear, we can provide suggestions for ways to mitigate many of the scary risks. Helping the little guy We believe that small businesses and organizations are particularly underserved by current resources. Our experience tells us that process improvement, when approached sensibly, can benefit many smaller organizations. For that reason, we've included examples from smaller environments. Our approach to incremental process improvement, driven by specific business value rather than simply seeking a maturity level, is especially appropriate for resource-strapped smaller organizations. If your business fits into this category, we hope the book will help you find the confidence to actively adopt new methods that have worked so well in other, larger places. Making process improvement more agile One response to traditionally process-heavy approaches, at least in the software industry, has been the agile methods movement. Methods such as Extreme Programming and Scrum have gained attention as approaches that are designed for easier implementation. Some argue that methods like these are incompatible with models like CMMI; others have found ways to use elements of both in complementary ways. In this book, we'll take a somewhat different approach and describe ways in which process improvement itself can take advantage of the agile philosophy and practices. We describe a more lightweight, focused, and time-constrained process improvement life cycle that we believe captures the flexibility and responsiveness of agile development methods. Through years of interaction with diverse organizations, we've seen the many ways that models and methods are used effectively to promote business value, and nearly as many ways that they can be used unproductively. So we've written this book to share approaches that have worked and identify a few that haven't. You can judge for yourself what might be achievable when you attempt to improve project management, engineering, or support practices in your own business environment. The book's format is intended to support readers who need a quick scan of the territory as well as those who are looking for actual techniques and templates. We believe that no one has all the answers. Many of our techniques are ones we have learned from others, and wherever possible, we'll tell you where to find more in-depth information. If you are just hearing about CMMI, model-based improvement, or agile methods, we hope that this book will provide a coherent set of steps and techniques to get you started on your path to improved practices. For those of you who are against the wall and under orders to adopt a model or method, we believe you will find fresh ways to approach your mandate, making the experience productive for you and your organization. And for all of you who pick up this book, we hope you'll find it enjoyable enough that you actually finish reading it! As we explore this material with you, it's the most ambitious goal we've set for ourselves. Organization In general, we are writing to you in much the way we would talk with you: directly and with a bit of wry humor thrown in. The organization of the book, based on an extended adventure analogy, is straightforward. There is increasing detail as you read, with earlier chapters being prologue to later chapters, thus providing good "management-level" reading. At the end of each chapter, we collect any references to other books or material. Occasionally we relate (mostly) real stories that we hope illustrate he subject through examples. The book is divided into five parts: Part I: Scouting the Territory. We describe process improvement from a practical standpoint, describing why we think it is worth pursuing, how it is helpful, and why it isn't as easy as it sounds. Part II: Mapping the Route. We provide some specific guides that can make process improvement more organized and often more effective. Part III: Surviving the Passage. We present a case study for those who like "reality shows" and describe ways in which survival of a process improvement initiative is analogous to physical survival as taught by the U.S. Army. Part IV: Experiencing the Journey. This is the section where the rubber meets the road. We discuss the specifics of executing a process improvement initiative and use CMMI to lead by example. Part V: Outfitting Your Expedition (PI Resources). This is our tools-and-techniques section, where we can go into more detail about some of the tools we've mentioned in previous chapters. We also provide a complete bibliography. Excerpted from CMMI Survival Guide: Just Enough Process Improvement by Suzanne Garcia, Richard Turner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
List of Figures | p. xiii |
List of Tables | p. xv |
Foreword | p. xvii |
Preface | p. xix |
Acknowledgments | p. xxiii |
Part I Scouting the Territory | p. 1 |
Chapter 1 Why We Think Process Is Important | p. 3 |
1.1 A short history of process improvement | p. 3 |
1.2 The role of processes in business | p. 5 |
Chapter 2 Why Process Improvement Helps | p. 9 |
2.1 Process improvement is about learning | p. 10 |
2.2 Process improvement should be driven by business value | p. 11 |
2.3 Process improvement can be valuable for organizations of all sizes | p. 12 |
2.4 You have choices in your improvement approach | p. 13 |
2.5 You have choices in the reference model | p. 20 |
Chapter 3 Why Process Improvement Isn't Trivial | p. 29 |
3.1 Building and sustaining sponsorship | p. 30 |
3.2 Managing an appraisal life cycle | p. 30 |
3.3 Developing and sustaining process improvement infrastructure | p. 31 |
3.4 Deploying new and improved processes | p. 32 |
3.5 Developing and measuring realistic goals | p. 34 |
3.6 Advantages and disadvantages of different-size improvement efforts | p. 35 |
3.7 Project management issues | p. 38 |
3.8 Common pitfalls for PI initiatives | p. 39 |
3.9 Summary of Part I | p. 40 |
Part II Mapping the Route | p. 43 |
Chapter 4 CMMI As Your Guide | p. 45 |
4.1 Why CMMI? | p. 45 |
4.2 CMMI primer | p. 47 |
4.3 Some choices to think about in using CMMI | p. 53 |
4.4 Using CMMI to guide your improvement | p. 61 |
Chapter 5 A Decision-based Life Cycle for Improvement | p. 65 |
5.1 Decide | p. 71 |
5.2 Try initial (additional) model elements | p. 80 |
5.3 Analyze | p. 82 |
5.4 Commit | p. 84 |
5.5 Reflect | p. 86 |
5.6 Summary of Part II | p. 88 |
Part III Surviving the Passage | p. 91 |
Chapter 6 A PI Case Study | p. 93 |
6.1 Decide (Cycle 1: To do or not to do) | p. 93 |
6.2 Decide (Cycle 2: What to do, where, and when) | p. 95 |
6.3 Try (Cycle 2: The first pilot) | p. 96 |
6.4 Analyze (Cycle 2: The first pilot) | p. 97 |
6.5 Commit (Cycle 2: The first pilot) | p. 98 |
6.6 Reflect (Cycle 2: The first pilot) | p. 99 |
6.7 Decide (Cycle 3: What's next) | p. 100 |
Chapter 7 Survival and PI | p. 103 |
7.1 Size up the situation | p. 104 |
7.2 Undue haste makes waste | p. 105 |
7.3 Remember where you are | p. 106 |
7.4 Vanquish fear and panic | p. 107 |
7.5 Improvise | p. 109 |
7.6 Value living | p. 110 |
7.7 Act like the natives | p. 111 |
7.8 Live by your wits, learn basic skills | p. 112 |
7.9 Summary of Part III | p. 113 |
Part IV Experiencing the Journey | p. 117 |
Chapter 8 Developing and Sustaining Sponsorship | p. 119 |
8.1 Communicating with and sustaining sponsorship of organizational leadership | p. 120 |
8.2 Seeking sponsors: Applying sales concepts to building and sustaining support | p. 122 |
8.3 Being a sponsor: Welcome to the "foreign element" | p. 127 |
Chapter 9 Setting and Measuring Against Realistic Goals | p. 131 |
9.1 Setting goals and success criteria aligned with sponsor objectives | p. 132 |
9.2 Understanding the current state of the organization: Readiness and Fit Analysis for CMMI | p. 137 |
9.3 How do you tell if you've succeeded? | p. 144 |
Chapter 10 Managing an Appraisal Life Cycle | p. 151 |
10.1 To appraise or not to appraise: Is that really the question? | p. 152 |
10.2 Different appraisal philosophies | p. 153 |
10.3 Managing the resources needed to plan and conduct appraisal activities | p. 156 |
Chapter 11 Developing Process Improvement Infrastructure | p. 161 |
11.1 Developing and sustaining process improvement team members | p. 162 |
11.2 Developing a team | p. 164 |
11.3 Establishing improvement infrastructure to support and sustain CMMI implementation | p. 167 |
11.4 Staffing and organization | p. 167 |
11.5 Creating and evolving a PAL (Process Asset Library) | p. 170 |
11.6 Measurement system / repository | p. 175 |
Chapter 12 Defining Processes | p. 179 |
12.1 CMMI Business Analysis | p. 180 |
12.2 Developing useful process guidance | p. 181 |
12.3 Collecting / incorporating lessons learned from improvement activities | p. 188 |
Chapter 13 Deploying Improved Processes | p. 191 |
13.1 Finding / selecting pilots for CMMI implementation | p. 191 |
13.2 Working with consultants | p. 197 |
13.3 Deploying practices to the targeted organizational scope | p. 199 |
13.4 Communication | p. 207 |
Chapter 14 Looking Ahead | p. 217 |
14.1 What's next for you? | p. 217 |
14.2 What's next for PI? | p. 219 |
14.3 Summary of Part IV | p. 221 |
Part V Outfitting Your Expedition (PI Resources) | p. 225 |
Chapter 15 Tools and Techniques | p. 227 |
15.1 An example of setting Smart goals | p. 228 |
15.2 Performing a CMMI Business Analysis | p. 230 |
15.3 Performing a Readiness and Fit Analysis | p. 235 |
15.4 One-Hour Process Description method | p. 238 |
15.5 Infusion and diffusion measurement | p. 245 |
15.6 CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) technique + Chaos Cocktail Party | p. 262 |
15.7 Additional resources | p. 265 |
Bibliography | p. 273 |
Index | p. 279 |