Capability Counts Series: Taking a Leap of Faith: Can Changing Course Before Your Appraisal Be a Good Thing?
By Dilek Oral-Ozdemirci, founder of Dora Process Consulting and lead appraiser/instructor for CMMI-DEV, and Sumeyra Gunel, manager of Programme/Design Quality Assurance at ASELSAN HBT Sector
ASELSAN HBT Sector, a top defense industry company based in Ankara, Turkey, had originally planned to work with Dora Process Consulting on a reappraisal for CMMI DEV V1.3 Maturity Level (ML) 3. While attending Capability Counts 2019, together, the companies decided to change course and upgrade to CMMI V2.0 without dramatically changing their appraisal timeline.
I am impressed by the courage and leadership demonstrated by ASELSAN HBT Sector in making the change from CMMI V1.3 to V2.0. In conversations with many companies around the world, I have seen a reluctance to move forward with the new model. In reality, if you are already working with V1.3, the learning and adaptation curve to upgrade to 2.0 is really not long or hard.
In the CMMI community, there are a lot of techniques, methods and tools for CMMI adoption. While it is very important to talk about the technical side of things, it also is critical to discuss the leadership needed in all areas of an organization. For a healthy and successful improvement initiative, everyone has to understand their role as a leader in what they do—no matter what level they are. Everyone in the organization has a stake in its success. Continuous improvement implementations need to recognize that it is not only the responsibility of process engineers and quality managers to improve—everyone needs to join in and help in any way they can.
Benefits of CMMI Adoption for ASELSAN HBT SECTOR
Among the benefits ASELSAN HBT Sector was looking to achieve with CMMI adoption were:
- Achieve a more reliable basis for predictions and forecasts for future projects.
- Make decisions for new risks by monitoring the defined risks.
- Create best practices within the organization and improve opportunities with positive measurement trends.
- Take corrective actions and define lessons learned from negative trends and trend analysis with past data by root cause analysis.
After receiving encouragement from V2.0 presentations at the Capability Counts 2019 event, ASELSAN HBT Sector wanted to be a leader in early adoption and set an example for others while creating a competitive advantage. It was also a value add for the company’s upgraded Quality Management System. In addition, V2.0 offered:
- Easier usage
- Cost effectiveness
- Easier integration and dissemination
- Performance focus
- Useful and integrated model
- Improved comprehensibility and accessibility
Once ready to take the leap to V2.0, the team needed to obtain management buy-in, identify training needs and communicate with project stakeholders. Then they worked to re-estimate the effort and budget, update the timeline of activities and obtain approvals for the changes.
CMMI V2.0 provided a good opportunity to show the dissemination of CMMI practices. It also enabled the company to appraise a larger percentage of the organization. Having a large sample helped increase process awareness of staff working on different projects and created a sense of accomplishment through an improved team player approach. By encouraging the sharing of knowledge and experience, it also resulted in a bigger contribution to building organizational memory.
Having a strong team-player approach required strong team leadership. Below are some of the most important characteristics of strong team leaders for this project:
- Courage, determination and vision to disrupt the status quo
- Extensive experience in engineering, quality, management and systems
- Long-time employees of the organization, thus a deep understanding of what is needed
- A greater vision for the organization and business, be resilient
- Enroll stakeholders into the new vision
- Set realistic goals, monitor and adapt
- Build alliance with internal and external stakeholders; bring in experts where necessary
- Communicate frequently
Teamwork and Tips
Shared values and traits are an important ingredient for a successful appraisal. Both the Lead Appraiser (LA) and the organization need to have a realistic view, past experience, motivation for improvement, belief in each other and an understanding of the value of CMMI.
Tips for building and sustaining trust and teamwork include encouraging teams to ask both “smart” and “dumb” questions, supporting patience as the LA gets to know the organization and as the organization learns more about the appraisal, and both parties owning their expertise while keeping an open mind.
Strong sponsor involvement and frequent open communications between the LA and the organization helped the appraisal move forward smoothly. The team also performed a thorough gap analysis, which not only relied on high-level interviews, but also involved real-time demonstrations of the systems for a true understanding of the footprints of process execution. The appraisal team itself had a good balance of first-time and experienced members, including those with the necessary clearance levels to review sensitive materials. Team members shared a willingness to adjust to shifts and changes, and focused their efforts on finding ways to continually work better together.
It is also helpful to allow more time for appraisal planning and start the LA/organization selection earlier than you would for V1.3. Become familiarized with the Performance Report early in the process. Keep refining the definitions of what is important for your business, this will help eliminate any pointless metrics in your catalogue and build a leaner system.
Proceed then in a step-by-step, structured way. For example, start with understanding where your organization currently stands and where you want it to go. It is the only way to learn if you are moving the needle on improvements.
Hindsight and Going Forward
The number one thing that ASELSAN HBT Sector says had the most significant impact on performance was achieved through learning and improvements they put in place for the Estimating and Managing Performance and Measurement Practice Areas. For the CMMI V2.0 appraisal, they clarified the relationship between these measurements and their objectives as an organization. For example, in some areas, the company changed the frequency of measurement collection activities to find more effective periods.
ASELSAN HBT Sector reviewed and rearranged activities related to the management of project estimates. They looked more closely to the lower-level estimates to see how the quality of these estimates impacted the quality of overall estimates, and as a new application, recorded why they define these estimates. This helped to evaluate the efficiency of the selected estimating method and revealed estimations about subcontractors.
In the Managing Performance and Measurement area, ASELAN HBT Sector improved integrated traceable KPIs from business drivers to process and project objectives. Project measurements began to feed the process measurement indicators. As a result, unsuccessful measurement and data collection were transformed into automated measurements and analysis. Methods for reviewing measurement data quality and processed data helped result in clean objective data. Their in-house developed Measurement Cockpit saw improvements, with results changing the way the business supports objectives. Together its activities helped identify lessons learned and enable a feedback mechanism closed loop.
In the Peer Reviews area, the company improved its mechanism of sustaining Review Tools and clarifying definitions used in the Review Tool. They also defined new KPIs to monitor the efficiency of the review tool and the process.
New KPIs were defined to track the tasks for all phases of the projects independently and collectively, as well as to track if a mitigation plan exists for each high-grade risk, as part of the improvements in the Planning and Managing Work, Monitor and Control, and Risk Management areas. All KPIs were defined as a risk to track their trends for the effectiveness of the mitigation and contingency plans. New technical and administrative methods were developed to improve managing the critical dependencies. A Competency Table is defined in the template of a project plan to make selection and decisions easier for the project team. The company also addressed a method for assessing tailored projects and evaluated resource needs at the beginning of the project. They also noted that the success of opportunity management in projects is defined as a criterion for quality awards.
One thing that ASELSAN HBT Sector would have done differently in hindsight is implementing a root cause analysis system to repeat the outstandingly successful results that they achieved. There was already a root cause analysis system in place for negative outcomes, so by analyzing successes, they would be better able to repeat them throughout the organization. In addition, they would have focused on opportunity management in a more structured way.
The next steps planned are to add High Maturity (HM) practices. CMMI V2.0 and its levels within the Practice Areas provide a foundation that can be leveraged for further improvements and next steps, and ASELSAN HBT Sector is now ready to move forward with High Maturity practices.
As users, practitioners, developers and service providers of CMMI, we all have a responsibility to continue to find better, leaner and more efficient ways to adopt the model to obtain its true benefits. Companies that have already worked with V1.3 should move forward and upgrade to V2.0 since much of the work has already been done, and the benefits are many.
