How can we switch to an agile software development lifecycle without causing project delays?

Hey CMMI Appraiser, we are a large software engineering firm in Ohio that uses the CMMI-DEV. For over a decade, we have used our own software development lifecycle, and recently decided to switch to Scrum.  I’m concerned about how we can help our engineers make this big change without causing project delays.  What should we do? ~ Chris H.

Chris, as more companies are adopting agile software development methods, the CMMI Appraiser has received a steady stream of questions about managing this change.  One of the leading experts on this topic is Julie Calfin, a Senior CMMI Consultant with Broadsword.  Julie does amazing work with companies who are undergoing large scale business transformation. Take it away, Julie! ~ The CMMI Appraiser

Thank you, CMMI Appraiser!

Chris, as I explained in my last blog post, Organizational Change Management techniques can help people change their behavior quickly with minimal disruption – and reach the mountain peak together.  We like to think of it as a Journey to Commitment.

To help us visualize the journey and how we will guide people through major changes, we use a tool called the Commitment Curve (above).  In the case of your software engineering firm, Chris, the Commitment Curve maps the upward journey your staff will experience on their way to accepting and committing to Scrum.

So let’s begin our trek up the mountain, one step at a time:

CONTACT – at the first step, it’s your job as management to reach out to every segment of the organization to announce a change is coming.  Be sure to use powerful examples to explain why your firm needs to make this change.  For example, announce the adoption of Scrum at an all-hands meeting.  Explain that an agile software development life cycle will enable your firm to develop working software that is consistently delivered on time and within budget.

AWARNESS – here is where your people start to climb.  They develop some awareness and knowledge of the program and the fact that it will affect the way they do their work.  People may gain awareness by participating in a program kick-off meeting on designing your new processes.  Note: we don’t want to weigh people down with too much detail at this point, or they may choose to exit the process (i.e. fall off the mountain).

UNDERSTANDING – as they gradually ascend the slope, folks come to identify with the change.  They see themselves in the change, and understand how it impacts them and the role they have.  You can help them with this by explaining the specific changes that will be required for each role.  For example, your Project Manager will need to go to Scrum Master training to learn how to use agile processes.

POSTIVE PERSPECTION – notice, each step up the curve brings us to a new choice point.  For example, your Project Manager can choose to perceive the change as good (“Our new estimating processes are going to help me be more accurate with my estimates”).  Or, she could just as easily decide that this new estimating process is too much work, or too time-consuming.  At this point in the commitment journey, you may want to use recognition and rewards to reinforce desired behaviors and to discourage unwanted behaviors.

ADOPTION – adoption is what we’re going for.  This is where our process users begin to adopt the agile techniques as their own.  Tactics like training, mentoring, and PPQA evaluations will accelerate the adoption of your new processes.  You will know your new processes are being adopted when you hear people say things like:   “Using our new agile development processes makes my job so much easier,” and “Be sure you train the new guy to use our agile processes.”

INSTITUTIONALIZATION – it takes some time and some critical mass of people who have adopted the new processes for the business transformation to become accepted as “our way of doing business.”  Institutionalization requires leadership to establish a clear process usage policy and reinforce this policy with their hiring and promotion decisions.

INTERNALIZATION – the mountain peak of process adoption – or any change – is when the change becomes part of the culture of your company.  With your agile process adoption, a symptom of internalization is when people begin improving upon it.  Use the CMMI practices in OPF, IPM, OPD, and others to continuously improve your new agile software development processes.

That’s the journey to commitment, Chris.  By having an OCM Strategy that includes tactics like communication, training, and performance management, you can move your engineers systematically through the stages of change and keep your team firmly on the path to greatness.

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

Julie Calfin is a Senior CMMI Consultant with BroadswordSolutions Corporation. She has years of real world experience using OCM strategy and tactics to help her clients achieve their goals. Julie also uses the CMMI, in partnership with her clients, to set-up, monitor, and sustain process improvement programs.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information about running a successful CMMI program.

How do you spell CMMI Relief?

Dear CMMI Appraiser – I am the owner of a small software engineering firm with large multi-national clients. We want to renew our CMMI appraisal to keep our CMMI certificate, but we find the process is just too complicated and too much overhead. How can we get relief? ~ Sunny A.

Sunny,

As you evaluate your CMMI appraisal and renewal, I suggest that you consider that this discussion is not about CMMI certification.  It’s about culture. Once you help your team get clarity on this matter, they’ll come to understand that process isn’t overhead. Process is the definition of how we do work every day.

I discussed this challenge in my interview with Bill Fox on 5 Minutes to Process Improvement Success! (now on Amazon), which is a blog that highlights the best in project management and process improvement strategies and tactics.

As I said to Bill, it sometimes helps to use a clever little trick to help teams think about process differently. Feel free to try this with your team, Sunny. Stand up and say, “Hey, everyone, I want to show you a new way to spell ‘process.’”

Then write out the phonetic spelling of the word ‘engineering,’ like this:

enjəˈni(ə)riNG

It's a funky looking word and it'll take them a moment to decode it.  Once they do, tell them what you mean. Say that process isn’t this thing we do that adds overhead, time and energy. If they do it that way, then they did it wrong. Instead, process is about how we perform engineering tasks every dy.

So how do they put this concept to work?

The method we utilize is one that we pioneered, called the AgileCMMI methodology. AgileCMMI starts with the concept that people learn best by digesting information in very small pieces – not by waterfall. Developers are no different. We present everything incrementally and iteratively, in a language they understand, using UML diagrams and data flow diagrams. It’s a much better approach than trying to convert them to process experts, which they will resent and resist.

Once they’ve started getting the benefits of adopting the CMMI in small pieces, through the use of their current tools and knowledge, your team will begin to see your point that process isn’t overhead. Process is not some foreign thing that you are making them do, but just another word for engineering.

The AgileCMMI methodology works in environments large and small. We’ve had really good success with small organizations like yours solving problems for big organizations like NASA.

There are other methods, and other CMMI consultants will surely have their own approaches. But whatever path you take, be sure to keep your team focused on culture, not certification. It really is the best way to get relief. 

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


Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author, and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff 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 running a successful CMMI program.

How does the CMMI help us stand on the shoulders of giants?

Dear CMMI Appraiser,

I saw an interesting tweet from you just now. What do you mean that “CMMI helps establish an environment for greatness by standing on the shoulders of giants?” ~ Sylvia B.

Sylvia, thank you for following the CMMI Appraiser on Twitter. With that quote, I am paraphrasing Sir Isaac Newton, who once famously said: "If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

The same is true about the CMMI -- from CMMI appraisals to CMMI training to CMMI consulting -- and organizations that have adopted it. The CMMI helps us see farther. The CMMI provides a framework for changing behaviors and changing culture that can establish an environment for allowing us to operate like a great company – for the long term. And it does so by allowing us to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Who are these giants? Other great companies! See, the idea is that if you adopt CMMI, you are standing on the shoulders of those who came before you. That means you don’t have to figure out what to do. You don’t have to come up with all things you need to worry about. Others before you have figured out the practices that will help improve the speed of software delivery, reduce defects, eliminate rework and make your projects more predictable and manageable. You receive all of the benefits of their lessons learned. That’s what the CMMI is: a large collection of lessons learned and best practices.

So, by adopting the CMMI and modeling your company’s behavior according to its principles, you are standing on the shoulders of others who have become great companies before you. Those “giants” have handed you the infrastructure and tools you need to be a great company.

And you didn’t even have to climb a beanstalk!

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

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author, and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff 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 running a successful CMMI program.

We're scientist that want to use the CMMI to support space projects. Will the CMMI work for us?

Dear CMMI Appraiser, our company provides scientific support services for government agencies. We don’t write software or work with engineering.  Can the CMMI help us be a great company also? ~ Snil V.

Snil,

The beauty of the CMMI is that it can be used to help any company establish an environment that can make you a great company, not just software or engineering organizations. And yes, it even works for companies that provide science support for government agencies.

For example, Broadsword has experience working with several companies that do exactly that at NASA. And who is more science-focused than NASA?

As a matter of fact, one of our clients does provide scientific services to NASA Goddard.  To help them be successful, we’ve had to evolve the way we apply and interpret  the CMMI.  As a result, the CMMI-DEV has been a perfect fit for the work they do. We are able to bend and strengthen the model for their environment, which is a science-support environment, not an IT environment. Our goal has been to interpret the model for them in a way that helps them be successful, as opposed to forcing them down a path that leads to a certificate.

Another company we work with builds Cryogenic Sytems for NASA.  No, they're not sending Walt Disney into space, they're developing products used to cool components needed for space flight. For them, we adapted the CMMI to fit into a small company environment. Apparently, other CMMI consultants whom they interviewed tried to force them to change the way they behave to meet a model. Ours has been a completely different approach. We’ve taken the CMMI and helped them understand how they can adapt the language and the model to fit into the way that they work. This helps them receive all of the benefits of the CMMI related to predictability, time, and budget, without creating a lot of overhead that results in a "paper-chase."

A third science-based company we’ve worked with does a lot of work for NASA also, designing and supplying sensors that are mounted on space vehicles to provide monitoring during launch. This is a large company with many different divisions performing many different functions. The company is now able to harness the efficiencies of using one single model – the CMMI – across its many different divisions, improving their ability to serve NASA and other scientific and aerospace organizations across the country.

What is the common thread? All of these are all scientific support organizations in highly technical environments.  In order to help solve their problems, we've had to bend, twist, and flex the CMMI so that it fit into the environment in which they operate.  And yes, all of them have had successful appraisals in the past.

You don’t have to be a software or engineering company to get the benefit of the CMMI, Snil. You have access to CMMI consultants who have experience with science-support organizations. Broadsword’s consultants are high tech people, not just generic CMMI consultants.

So, yes, Snil, the CMMI absolutely can work for science support companies, not just software or engineering companies. The key is to work with a CMMI consultant who understands your unique challenges, and can provide expertise specific to your environment.

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

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author, and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff 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 running a successful CMMI program.