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make a difference in the process improvement decisions in your organiza-
tion. 26
The following true story should be motivation to pay some attention to this risk.
5.29 Party Time! We're Level 3! The Meeting a Year Later
with Ethan
I happened to be at the BOND facility to attend a meeting with another client
a year after the organization had achieved its formal CMMI level 3 rating.
When I stopped by to talk to Ethan (one of the co-founders of BOND), I
learned that this organization—which had been growing at a 30 percent per
year rate reaching over 150 people at the time of the 2007 appraisal—was now
down to 90 people just one year later. When I asked Ethan about it, he replied:
I don't think they understand what they bought. They got us completely
turned around heading in the other direction.
I had a discussion earlier with a leader of the corporation that acquired
BOND and I was trying to explain how the CMMI could help an organiza-
tion achieve its goals. He replied:
Sounds like the CMMI can help us. Our goal is to reduce overhead.
I told Ethan whenever I hear this I never have a good answer. Ethan replied:
This view comes from people who have never had an opportunity or been
trained to build an organization with a future—one that will grow and
have greater value tomorrow than today. The problem in these large organi-
zations is that they put people in senior positions who all their life have been
given budgets and they think the goal is just to get to the end when the bud-
get runs out—they think the end is when the budget is zero and there is
nothing more. They think that is the goal. The problem is, when you think
this way you get exactly what you are focusing on. You are driving toward
a goal where at the end there is nothing. And that is where we are headed
here. They just don't understand what it takes to grow a business. They
don't understand the real goal.
26. For more information on the value of level 4 and 5 practices, refer back to Chapter 3, and ahead to
Chapters 9 and 10.
 
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