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a formal CMMI appraisal. To gain the full benefits of templates at BOND, we
had to institute a few related rules.
As part of the tailoring process at BOND, one key rule was that sections of
templates were never deleted. If a section was not applicable on a project, the
tailoring rules required you to state
NA
in that section. However, we devel-
oped most templates at BOND with the goal of providing the “minimum”
that all projects would need. This meant there should rarely be sections that
were not applicable. The “minimum
”
strategy was not intended to imply we
expected projects to only provide the minimum, but rather to help clarify the
lower bound of tailoring.
To a c h i e v e t h i s , t e m p l a t e c o n t e n t a n d p ro c e s s d e f i n i t i o n s w e re d e v e l o p e d
within the Technical Working Groups. The groups were asked to think about
the issues involved with scaling when developing these templates.
By creating templates as “minimums,” tailoring became
tailor up
, not tailor
down activity. This simplifies tailoring for the small projects. Too often in
large organizations, tailor down approaches are used. This is least efficient,
creating the greatest amount of work on smaller projects that have the great-
est resource constraints.
When templates are developed from the “minimum must do” perspective
aligning with the “as-is” processes, and the thinking that has gone on
through a CMMI gap analysis, they become powerful aids in creating clear
expectations for the executing team, and any external group that might need
to assess on-going activities.
In July 2007 when we conducted the formal CMMI appraisal at BOND striv-
ing for a CMMI level 3 rating over 18 Process Areas, it was estimated that this
appraisal included over 4000 objective pieces of evidence to back up our
results. Hundreds of these objective evidence points were found in single
documents developed using well-defined templates. The total number of
actual physical artifacts needed to acquire those 4000 points therefore turned
out to be less than 400. That is the power of using templates
14
An example of how the development of a plan by using a Project Manage-
ment Plan (PMP) template and then following that plan, can result in the
generation of multiple pieces of evidence that meet CMMI specific and
generic practices can be found in Table 5-6.
15
14. Tailoring is discussed at greater length in Chapter 7 in the GEAR case study.
15. Refer to annotated PMP template in the appendices for more information.