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greater awareness in the organization of the purpose of a life cycle as an aid
to keep finance and engineering aligned.
CMMI Project Planning Process Area SP 1.3, Define Project Life Cycle, can
help “Agile-like” organizations that exhibit cost and schedule management
problems by improving
communication
among engineering, management,
and finance.
7.12 At GEAR, “It Depends on Who Shows Up”
In the gap analysis interviews, I heard about a number of effective project
monitor and control activities. One was a regular Monday meeting between
project managers and functional managers that used a staffing spreadsheet
to facilitate discussions of current project priority staffing needs.
I also heard about an “institutionalized”
4
Thursday meeting with Senior
Management and project leaders. The Thursday meeting was a project-spe-
cific Senior Management review using a standard chart, referred to as the
quad chart, which contained key measures related to the cost, schedule, risk,
and performance health of each project.
While I heard about these meetings in my interviews, I found nothing writ-
ten that described the purpose of these meetings or the existence of the
artifacts they used to support them (i.e., staffing chart, quad chart).
During the gap analysis out-brief at GEAR, I explained the important dis-
tinction the CMMI model makes between “do it” (e.g., “perform it”) and “do
it” as an institutionalized “managed” or “defined” process. I explained the
importance of this distinction using words from a technical leader's response
to a question about the effectiveness of key meetings at GEAR:
It depends on who shows up.
What I found at GEAR was that the Monday and Thursday meetings were
very effective. Other meetings, such as Project Kickoff meetings, or Project
We e k l y s c h e d u l e s t a t u s m e e t i n g s c o u l d n o t b e c o u n t e d o n t o b e e ff e c t i v e . T h e
value of meetings at GEAR was driven by the people who believed those
meetings had value.
4. By “institutionalized” here I mean only that it was done with great regularity in the organization. It is
worth noting that this does not meet the intent of “institutionalization” in the CMMI sense of being “man-
aged” or “defined.”
