Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
At BOND, many of the projects are often made up of teams from multiple
organizations that are physically distributed. Agile practices such as collabo-
rating with customer personnel and daily standup meetings help us involve
relevant stakeholders by supporting more effective direct communication.
During a project lead workshop at BOND, the difficulties that often arise in
facilitating the involvement of relevant stakeholders when team members
are not physically collocated—and might even be from external organiza-
tions with differing cultures from BOND—arose.
Ty p i c a l l y, o b j e c t i v e e v i d e n c e e m p l o y e d i n a C M M I a p p r a i s a l t o i n d i c a t e t h a t
stakeholder involvement is being achieved are things such as meeting invita-
tion lists. I have heard comments such as:
As long as you have invited them, that is all you need to do.
However, showing that you invited someone to a meeting doesn't demon-
strate whether that person was really
involved.
What do you do if you invite
people, but they don't respond?
Because this is a common issue at BOND, we have made it a specific training
topic within the workshop by presenting scenarios and asking the group to
share options to handling each. Example scenarios that have been discussed
include:
What do you do when the person responsible for the initial project plan is in
another organization and you can't control that person?
People at BOND have become successful with this type of challenge through
proactive efforts. In workshops, we have heard stories of team members who
have started a draft project plan for an external team member and then
emailed it to them. They followed up with a phone call discussing the value
of developing such a plan. Such proactive techniques have proven effective
in helping projects that are trying to use an Agile approach, but might have
team members who are not yet up to speed.
5.22 Sharing Across the Organization
Agile techniques focus on the project. CMMI is concerned about projects, but
also about the organization. When we focus on projects, personnel can become
isolated, missing valuable experiences on other projects. Sharing experiences
and lessons across projects is one benefit of interactive workshops. Workshops
