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This was a key finding in the gap analysis. There were many good management
and engineering practices happening at GEAR—but they weren't happening
because of any particular policy, planned process , or training in the organization.
I don't mean to downplay the importance of influential people driving effec-
tive process execution. This is essential. It was clear many highly motivated
and skilled people were critical to the success GEAR had achieved. While
explaining this during my gap analysis out-brief, I emphasized that the orga-
nization was at risk in a number of critical areas because they were heavily
dependent on key individuals to make certain activities occur.
This is why a recommendation for GEAR, like BOND and NANO, was to
extract valuable practices and document them for the benefit of others in the
organization. This is another replay from BOND.
LESSON 3
Process improvement doesn't always mean behavior change.
Many of the most important process improvements in Agile organizations 5
involve capturing what already works and sharing it with others so it will
continue to work even if key people unexpectedly change roles, or leave the
organization.
7.13 Does the Written and Trained Process Match the Real
Process?
On the Engineering side where the requirements development process and
flow down had been written down, we had a different challenge. In this case,
engineering had a written requirements development and management
process, but the process reflected a very strict waterfall approach to develop-
ment. This was not the way most of the projects were working.
In this case, I specified the reasons why it was important to reflect how the orga-
nization really worked in written processes. This would help train new people
in how to work, and others in how to plan work so the schedule and budget
authorizations would align with on-going real work in the organization. This
was a case where we had a real problem with cost overruns. We needed to make
changes in GEAR's practices for improvement to take hold.
5. This is not intended to imply that being “Agile-like” is satisfactory. Only that capturing what works is
important, but might not be sufficient.
 
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