Capability Counts Series: IBM Maximizes Business Benefits with the High Maturity Approach
By Sherine Anwar, IBM Client Services Excellence High Maturity Eminence Leader, and Aman Singhal, IBM Client Services Excellence Leader
During its most recent CMMI benchmark appraisal in 2019, IBM redesigned its high maturity approach to address the new
CMMI V2.0 requirements. This includes company’s focus to maximize business values to our clients and to improve IBM business results from implementing High Maturity practices.
CMMI V2.0 helps to guide businesses toward process improvement via maturity levels that represent a staged path for an organization’s performance and process improvement efforts based on predefined sets of practice areas. The processes and efforts at levels 4 and 5 are referred to as high maturity practices.
Maturity Level 0: Incomplete
Maturity Level 1: Initial
Maturity Level 2: Managed
Maturity Level 3: Defined
Maturity Level 4: Quantitatively Managed
Maturity Level 5: Optimizing
As a case study to narrate, for one of the projects that was part of the larger effort, the IBM team had to identify the project objectives, set the quality and process performance objectives (QPPOs), determine what challenges the project faced and learn how high maturity practices help them overcome challenges. The team also planned to see how the learnings from this experience were generalized and provided benefits at the organizational level.
Project QPPOs were:
- At least 90% of deliverables to be delivered on time (Schedule variation % <= 5%
- At least 90% of deliverables to be delivered on-quality (Delivered Defect Rate <= 0.5 defects/100 PH)
We used high maturity practices to analyze, identify and leverage best practices already implemented in the projects; highlight opportunities for improvement; and identify process shifts when they happen. One of the most important and significant outcomes was being able to qualify the structural quality of the applications and use quantitative analysis to improve operations.
For example, the company was using its own organizational baselines for structural quality. Through a process and cultural shift, teams are now able to measure the quality of code, standardize these measures, and confidently report back to the organization and its clients.
IBM has analytics and metrics-focused programs to train practitioners and project managers on quantitative, statistical techniques and how to implement the concepts of quantitative project management so they can manage their projects more effectively and proactively. Even when quality methods and tools are fully integrated, organizations still need a quantitative approach to ensure they are using them correctly and are moving in the right direction.
IBM has been using automation and cognitive tools for years and plans to further expand use of these tools to enhance the search of IBM learning and experience assets. In other words, if someone searches for a specific asset, the system will show other similar assets that people have viewed and it will suggest other sets of assets in the same theme.
Next Steps
Considering the large volume of projects at IBM, identifying and sharing best practices is a continual challenge. Within an evolving Agile development environment, learnings are quite project specific. So, the goal is to make the causal analysis and resolutions (CARs) conducted at a project level available to other projects that can benefit from them.
With this thought process, IBM is creating buckets and categorizing projects according to project and type of technology domain, and according to different parameters. The next stop is to develop a cognitive advisor, which will gather symptoms and challenges faced by project managers. The cognitive advisor can then provide practice assets and case studies that match the current project challenges and help maximize learning across the organization.
Shared Advice
One concept that we believe has long held true: pay attention to the voice of the process. By continually analyzing project data, the IBM teams are able to proactively identify problems for performance people to address. Seeking out suitable actions is a common practice. With the new core practices available with
CMMI V2.0, IBM can assess the actions taken at the project level and generalize them at the organizational level, so it is easier to spread the knowledge and best practices across a project.
