I receive many calls and emails from companies who are interested in obtaining a CMMI maturity level. Most of the time they want a maturity level so they can bid on RFPs that have a CMMI requirement. Few companies want to establish a process improvement program in order to increase efficiency and effectiveness. Regardless of their motive, I tell them the first thing I need to do is review their current documented process, procedures, work instructions and/or templates.
The common response to this is, “We don’t have much documented.” That is okay, but I still need to see what they have. Once I receive their documents I will review this information, map them to the model. A common mistake is the companies will send me a bunch of project artifacts. These artifacts will eventually be needed, but not until after I review their processes. I need to review the processes – the documents that tell someone how to do an activity.
Another common question is, “What are you looking for in a process?” The guidance I use is to determine if similarly qualified/experience persons can follow the process and get the same results. What kind of guidance is provided in the process? What do I mean?
If a process says, “Create a project management plan”, I would say that is not a good process because two experienced project managers would create two different PMPs, and most likely would not contain the information the company wanted.
If the process says, “Create a project management plan using the PMP template”, I would review the PMP template and if it have instructions for each section, then I would say that is a good process. I would feel confident that two project managers following the PMP template would produce similar PMPs, and would contain the information the company wants.
Once my review is completed, I will give them an Excel spreadsheet that has all the scores for all CMMI practices and the company has a baseline of their processes and the gaps identified.
Now, what to do? There are basically three choices:
- Address the gaps with company personnel
- Hire someone to lead and assist with this effort
- Purchase a tool
I will address the three options in my next blog.