Preface

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 possibilities, 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 über-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 under-served 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 the 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.

A note about the illustrations for the part introductions: These woodcuts were executed by artist and designer Witold Gordon in 1926 for an illustrated edition of Marco Polo’s The Travels of Marco Polo (The Venetian), translated by William Marsden and corrected by Manuel Komroff. We thought these wonderful art deco pieces were particularly appropriate, because process improvement is both an adventure and a journey of discovery.