Chapter 14
Looking Ahead

In the preceding chapters, we have made our way through philosophy, practicality, applicability, and survivability, not to mention creativity, to arrive here at possibility. What is possible for you and your organization in your environment? What does the future hold for the practice of process improvement? What’s the possibility that you can sell this book used? (Just kidding.)

In this chapter, we try to answer the above questions and help you chart your own path toward better, more effective, and more efficient processes.

14.1 What’s Next for you?

Now that you have learned about our approach to surviving CMMI and process improvement, it’s time to look at your own future. You understand the rationale and difficulties behind process improvement. You have access to tools, techniques, and resources for implementing process improvement. You have several approaches and models to choose among. You even have a case study to help visualize your entire initiative. So don’t sit there lollygaggin’; get up and do something!

14.1.1 Figure out Where you are in your Own Decision Cycle

As Watts Humphrey has said more times than he can count, “If you don’t know where you are, any map will do.” So the first next step is to find out where you are in your considerations of process improvement:

•   Are you still considering a process improvement initiative? Have you made that list of reasons, pro and conb?

•   Has such an initiative been mandated? If so, have you looked at how best to integrate the required improvement activity with meeting your existing business goals?

•   Do you have sponsorship? If not, reread Chapter 8, and look for strategies that seem to fit your situation. Do the sales techniques provide insight into how you could move forward? Are there particular executives who might be experiencing pain that your process improvement effort could ease?

14.1.2 Proceed from There

When you’ve figured out your location vis-à-vis process improvement decision making, you’ll be able to start moving in some direction. Here are some pointers:

•   Be realistic about where you are and what you can achieve in the near term. Don’t promise things you can’t deliver to sell your PI initiative. It’s much better to not do PI right now than it is to fail at it and possibly jeopardize any future efforts. If the time just doesn’t seem right, pursue other activities that will support later improvement, such as measurement programs and quality-assurance practices.

•   Figure out where you need consulting versus training versus other kinds of resources. Know how much you are going to need to spend so that you can get the right amount of funding and other resources from the sponsor.

•   Be bold with your approach. It is equally wrong to underestimate what you can do if there is a high probability of significant impact.

14.1.3 Find the Right Resources

You’ve got a location and a direction, and possibly some tasks. Now you need to make sure you’ve got the right “team” working for you. Our quick tips for resources:

•   Read the next chapter carefully.

•   SEI Partner Network is a safe place to start for consulting. These companies have been through all the required training and met the rigorous standards established by the SEI.

•   Don’t try to learn everything yourself. Even smart engineers and managers can’t expect to get all the nuances of some of the models and life cycles without some support. If nothing else, you can save time and energy struggling to solve problems that have already been solved in dozens of other places.

•   Use the SEPG Conference, NDFA CMMI Conference, and SPIN resources in your area to check up on consultants and share lessons learned. If there is someone in your company who has done PI before, find out what challenges and enablers he or she found.

We want you to succeed. If that means succeeding in process improvement, and we have helped in that journey, we are happy. If, however, PI isn’t in the stars for you, follow the signs and guides of your environment, and look for other ways to improve. There are many roads to success, and we hope you find the one that’s straightest and broadest for you.

14.2 What’s Next for Process Improvement?

Although this section will become dated at some point (given today’s acceleration of technology development, probably by the time this book is published), we thought it was still worthwhile to provide some insights as to where we see the process movement going as of the writing of this edition. Just like the organizations that embrace process improvement, the process improvement movement itself must evolve and learn to remain vibrant lest we become what Barry Boehm calls “change-averse change agents.” Here are a few of the things going on that may be of interest to you as you look beyond your individual organization’s improvement journey.

14.2.1 International Process Research Consortium (IPRC)

The IPRC is a consortium of researchers and forward-thinking companies that are working together to build a road map of future research needed to further the ability of process to support businesses. Through a series of six workshops facilitated by the Software Engineering Institute, this group of researchers from around the world has explored current research directions, as well as possible future needs for process support. The first road map from the consortium is scheduled to be published in the fall of 2006. Other activities that are possible are a working group on implementing processes in small settings and one for e-health systems. Check the SEI Web site, www.sei.cmu.edu/iprc, for details and ongoing information about the IRPC and its products and events.

14.2.2 CMMI Constellations

With the publication of CMMI version 1.2, more information is becoming available about some future directions for CMMI that the CMMI Steering Group has established. One of the most interesting and possibly far reaching of these is the concept of a set of CMMI constellations.

The idea of these constellations is that a core of CMMI practices is generally useful no matter what model context is being used. These practices are supplemented by groups of Process Areas that reflect a cluster, or constellation, of practices particular to a broad, but not all-inclusive, context. The three constellations that have been identified so far are

•   Product Development. This is the baseline and is the one reflected in the current model content.

•   Services. This one is in the works and is expected to cover the kind of operations/services delivery context consistent with an Information Technology operation or an engineering services organization, among others.

•   Acquisition. This constellation is also in the works and is expected to cover the practices common in organizations that primarily contract for and accept products, rather than develop and integrate them.

Conceptually, organizations would be able to choose one or more constellations to work from and be appraised against. While retaining the core practices across all their contexts, they would be able to use the constellations to improve the fit of the CMMI practices to particular parts of their organization. This constellation concept is consistent with CMMI ideas going back to the CMM standards work that was done in the mid-’90s and has the potential for improving CMMI’s utility even more than what we’re seeing today.

14.2.3 ISO Working Group on Life Cycles for Very Small Enterprises

In October of 2005, the committee within ISO that has been working on process-focused standards for the past dozen years^† commissioned a new working group, Working Group 24, to address Life Cycle Processes for Very Small Enterprises (VSE). What makes this effort noteworthy is that the group does not intend to create another compliance-oriented standard. Rather, it is looking at using existing ISO standards to create a “profile” of practices to recommend to VSEs, along with a guidebook to help users interpret and make more effective use of existing ISO standards, most of which were not created with VSEs in mind. Claude Laporte, the project editor for the working group, plans to establish a Web site to solicit community input on the intermediate efforts of the working group. We suggest that you search for ISO SC7 Working Group 24 and Claude Laporte, or something similar, to find it. For a presentation on this working group’s plans/efforts, look on the SEI Web site for the Proceedings of the 1st International Researcher’s Workshop on Process Improvement in Small Settings.¹

† SC7, for those of you who speak ISO-ese

1. Garcia, Suzanne, et al. Proceedings of the 1st International Researcher’s Workshop on Process Improvement in Small Settings. CMU/SEI-2006-SR-001. (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University, 2006).

The presentation is one of the items included in the technical report.

14.2.4 Integration of Different Process Improvement–Related Technologies

One of the many challenges for people in the improvement field is to help organizations understand which of the various improvement approaches are relevant and useful for different situations and contexts. With the Software Engineering Process Management (SEPM) program of the SEI, integrating process improvement support technologies like PSP, TSP, and CMMI is being actively addressed, as well as integrating techniques like Six Sigma into SEI approaches to measurement. You can expect to see new courses and other support materials as these efforts progress.

14.3 Summary of Part IV

Part IV is certainly the richest part of the book, but we hope it has answered many of your questions about how to approach the common challenges of establishing and sustaining an improvement effort, especially when you’re dealing with a resource-constrained environment. Part IV could have been even more dense (the other term we’ve heard for content-rich) if we had put all the details of some of the techniques we’ve introduced into it. Instead, we chose to move procedural detail for techniques like CMMI-based Business Analysis and Readiness and Fit Analysis into their own chapter, Chapter 15. When you’re ready for them, they’ll be there for you.

You have now journeyed (vicariously at least) through most of the common challenges you’ll face as you get started, and you have some idea of what to do about them. From establishing sponsorship to understanding what a transition mechanism is and why you should care, you have navigated the landscape of process improvement and have started to use CMMI as your guide, not only for your organization but also for your own process improvement tasks. We can’t emphasize enough how much difference leading by example makes in an improvement effort. It’s much more powerful to be able to say to someone, “I’ve done this, and here’s how it works,” than to say, “I’ve read about this, and here’s how it’s supposed to work.”

This is the close of the main parts of the book. Here, we brought you back to “What are you going to do now?” because we hope that this book will truly become a guide for your efforts, not just a book on your shelf. We also shared some of the things going on that we find interesting in the world of process improvement, even though we know that Chapter 14 will be out of date even before this book completes production. The point is not so much what exactly is going on, but that there is always something going on, and staying up to speed with process improvement research and practice is a never-ending activity.

Illustration from The Travels of Marco Polo by Witold Gordon (1885–1968)