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skilled technical people in the organization with strong opinions about
“how” they did their job, one of the major problems they had previously
encountered when trying to document their processes was agreeing on
“how-to” details.
By separating the “what you must do” from the “how to do it,” GEAR man-
agement felt the organization would move forward and reach consensus
more easily on process definitions since we were essentially raising the dis-
cussion above where most conflicts had arisen in the past.
7.11 Aligning Engineering and Project Management at
GEAR
In the CMMI Project Planning Process Area, Specific Practice 1.3 states:
Define the project lifecycle phases on which to scope the planning effort.
The results of defining a project life-cycle should create a framework for esti-
mating and managing project work. The life cycle documentation I reviewed
at GEAR indicated they used a waterfall development approach. However,
when I listened to people talk about how they did their job, the actual work
described sounded more like an incremental and evolutionary approach.
When I raised this as a potential issue, some in engineering responded
that they didn't see the significance of the issue I was raising. Their com-
ment was:
We just look at what we do as a series of waterfalls when we don't have all
the requirements up front. What difference does it make how we define the
life cycle?
The problem I saw and explained to them, was that this appeared to occur on
most projects, and affected the real work that was going on. I understood
why they worked the way they did, but they were planning as if they were
going to conduct a single pass through each of their waterfall phases. That
was how management had set up the project master schedule and allocated
budgets.
Because they didn't work this way, a misalignment between the planned and
budgeted work and what work they actually did resulted. Frequent cost and
schedule overruns were the serious consequence. This discussion led to
