Thursday, October 24, 2013

Do we need agileCMMI if we’re already a great company?

Hey, CMMI Appraiser, we keep hearing from our biggest customer that adopting the CMMI is helpful for Agile contractors like us because it can make us a great company. Well, we think we’re already a great company! Do we really need to worry about combining Agile with CMMI? ~ Zino, Quality Assurance

Hey, Zino,

Great question! I love that you see yourselves as a great company. But allow me to ask: How do you know?

How do you know you’re a great company? Are you good at what you do? How do you know? How do you determine your goodness or greatness? How well is your team performing? When you ask for feedback, are you getting the truth – or only what you want to hear?


A lot of CMMI Appraisers would take a comment like yours – “We’re a great company” – and they would say, “Show me your metrics for understanding project performance.”

I like to cut to the chase. That’s why I asked, “Are you good at what you do?”

It’s very important in QA to be able to answer that question for your team. But it doesn’t stop with you. You want your bosses to be able to answer that question, too.

So here’s the next question: How do you communicate your greatness to the non-agile leaders in the organization?

Non-agile leaders are in accounting and marketing, as well as management. For different reasons, they want the same thing your customer wants. They want to know how you know you are good at what you do. And that means you must communicate in THEIR language, not yours.

Anyone who has been in management can tell you that communication is critical. In my career, I have been a CIO, CTO and a VP of Service Delivery for a couple of large consulting firms. Having been in that office, I can tell you, these are questions we ask.

For example, let’s say we’ve asked you to do agile projects. We might sit down with you and say, “Zeno, we’ve invested in agile. Are we getting anything out of our investment? Help us understand. Does the way you do your work enable us to deliver better service to our customers?”

Clearly, goodness and greatness have nothing to do with agile. They have everything to do with project performance, however. I don’t care if is an agile project or a Waterfall project. You can get great results from both, and both are appropriate for different kinds of environments. But regardless of the values, methods or tools you are using, if I were your manager, I’d want answers:

“How is it going?  Are you any good at this? How do we know?”

If you can’t answer that, then, yes, you do need the structure of the CMMI to strengthen agile. Without it, you won’t survive in the agile community, because the big spenders are going to come along and crush you.

There's nothing great about that.  

Need more info about utilizing the architectural strengths of the CMMI to make agile more resilient to change and large-scale corporate pressure? Check out our upcoming Webinar: Agile Resiliency: Scaling Agile So That It Thrives & Survives,” on Friday, October 25, 2013 from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM (EDT). And be sure to tell a friend!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, ScrumMaster, author, and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff pioneered agileCMMI, the leading methodology for incremental and iterative process improvement. He has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information about engineering strategy, performance innovation , software process improvement and running a successful CMMI program.

To download eBooks about CMMI, visit Jeff’s Author Page on Amazon.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Can CMMI save us from the Black Hole of Lessons Learned?

Hey, CMMI Appraiser, we’re a growing Virginia-based software firm, serving federal, state and local government agencies. We’re thinking about adopting the CMMI add more consistency to what we’re doing. For example, all of our teams currently do retrospectives, but some are good at applying lessons learned to future projects, and some aren’t. Can CMMI help here? ~ Allan P.

Dear Allan,

That’s great that you are thinking of ways to be agile for continuous improvement using the CMMI. One of the most useful secrets of the CMMI its ability to help you to get better at what you are ALREADY doing. Since you are already doing retrospectives, there is just one more thing you need to do to be on the way to being a great company. Just ask the following question:

How will the project down the hall benefit from the lessons we’ve learned?

I mean this literally: ask. Out loud. Word-for-word. Because if you don’t ask, you won’t know. And if you don’t know, chances are, all of that valuable data has already been lost in the Black Hole of Lessons Learned.


Most companies collect some kind of lessons learned. From what I’ve seen, however, they collect them on a network drive that nobody ever looks at. You’ve probably had this experience. Unless you build an architecture and a system around collecting and implementing lessons learned, you may as well not bother storing them. It’s a complete waste of your time.

That’s why I have a real beef with the attitude of some Scrum Puristas who walk around proudly pounding themselves on the chest, saying, “We’re awesome at continuous improvement because we have retrospectives.”

So what? How does that help the project down the hall? How does that help the project in the other building? How does that help the project across town?

It’s great that a Scrum Team can do retrospectives and use that information to get better and better. It's certainly a step up from a more traditional project.  I am certainly in favor of keeping it in the method, and it’s a cool thing to be proud of. But I don’t think it’s so impressive when this information is self-contained within a four- or five-person team. They may as well be throwing it into a Black Hole.

As you know, collecting lessons learned – reviewing how things went and how to make them better – are highly useful behaviors for your company. They need to be institutionalized in a way that helps to make the whole company great, and not just the Scrum team that is going to disband without sharing anything they’ve learned.

That's where the CMMI can help you. The Model guides you to build an architecture and a system around collecting and implementing lessons learned, so that they don’t fall into the Black Hole.

For more information about strengthening agile methods with the CMMI, be sure to catch our keynote presentation at SEPGNA 2013 on "Agile Resiliency: How CMMI Will Make Agile Thrive and Survive."

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, ScrumMaster, author, and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff pioneered agileCMMI, the leading methodology for incremental and iterative process improvement. He has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information about engineering strategy, performance innovation , software process improvement and running a successful CMMI program.

To download eBooks about CMMI, visit Jeff’s Author Page on Amazon.


Friday, October 11, 2013

Hey, Guy, Don’t follow the CMMI!

Hey CMMI Appraiser, we’ve seen enough good results from our Agile techniques that we are planning to transition most of our engineering (about 300 developers) from the Waterfall methodology to Agile. Are there rules in the CMMI that we can follow to help us make the switch? Specifics, please. ~ Guy G.

Hey, Guy,

Stop right there. I can’t name a better tool to help you with a full scale organizational transformation than the CMMI, but before you take another step, I must warn you: Don’t follow the CMMI!

Don’t follow the CMMI as though it were a rule book about compliance, because it’s not. Think of the CMMI as a set of questions that you ask yourself about the work you do (in this case, rolling out agile). This is an important distinction. The CMMI is a set of questions about process improvement, performance improvement, and helping you be a great company.  It's NOT a set of rules.


So, here’s what you DON’T try to do. Don’t try to replicate the CMMI in a Waterfall-type of methodology. Instead, take a look at your agile methodology, and ask yourself a series of questions about Scrum or Extreme Programming (or both – whatever you are ALREADY doing).

The CMMI has practices designed to help you get better at what you do, the way you do it, incrementally and iteratively. Within the framework of the CMMI, you are constantly asking questions about your work, such as:

  • What’s the plan for rolling this out across the enterprise?
  • Which methods are we supporting?
  • What’s the plan for getting everyone up to speed?
  • Which projects use which methods, and why?

We call these “CMMI questions.” CMMI questions can (and should) be applied to your agile values, methods and techniques, establishing an Agile Resiliency Architecture, which enables you to manage large scale organizational change without disrupting the business.

Back to your question, Guy, you asked for specifics, so let's talk techniques. Your agile techniques are the specific actions that need to be strengthened as you roll out agile, companywide.

Focusing on techniques, the CMMI questions to ask are things like, “How are we going to estimate?” Your answer may be that one project is going to use Planning Poker, while another project is going to use Fibonacci Sequence, while a third project is going to use something different. That’s fine. You’ll base your decision on the way you ALREADY do things.

See, the CMMI is all about providing guidance for managing your company’s uniqueness. In your case, it helps you manage the specific actions as you roll out your agile techniques. The Model guides you to keep asking questions, such as:

  • What’s the plan for the techniques?
  • Which techniques will we be able to support with tools?
  • How are we going to be able to support all of the tools, techniques and methods people are going to need?
  • How are we going to teach people to use all of these things?

These are just of few specific CMMI questions that were designed to give you guidance, Guy. There are many, many more questions and practices within the CMMI – and not one rule.

For those interested in learning more about using the CMMI as a guide to manage large scale organization change, Broadsword is hosting another FREE, LIVE Webinar on Friday, October 25, 2013 at 1PM ET. Click here to join us for “Agile Resiliency: Scaling Agile so that it Thrives & Survives.”

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, ScrumMaster, author, and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff pioneered agileCMMI, the leading methodology for incremental and iterative process improvement. He has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information about engineering strategy, performance innovation , software process improvement and running a successful CMMI program.

To download eBooks about CMMI, visit Jeff’s Author Page on Amazon.