Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Project Planning includes Risk Identification. Therefore, in the Project Plan-
ning working group it is natural to get into Risk Management, which has its
own Process Area. Project Planning Specific Practice 3.2 states:
Reconcile the project plan to reflect available and estimated resources.
Related discussions often lead to actions taken to keep the plan current,
which in turn leads to practices within the Project Monitor and Control
Process Area.
One of the challenges of managing an aggressive CMMI Process Improve-
ment schedule is getting the right people together at the right time to talk
about practices. The right Subject Matter Experts for Project Planning, Project
Monitor and Control, and Risk Management are often the same people. It is
natural to perform these management functions in an integrated way in
many organizations; therefore, it is natural and efficient to discuss these
practices together.
Another benefit of working closely coupled process areas together is that
process descriptions emerge fitting in a more
integrated
and efficient way.
Nothing in the CMMI model says you need to package your processes as the
CMMI model has packaged its process areas.
Because of this I recommended that the working groups at GEAR be organized
around natural “threads” of work that were closely coupled, rather than
around the CMMI Process Areas. We made sure we hit all the specific prac-
tices. However, using this approach helped address each area more efficiently.
Another advantage to this approach related to a comment the VP of Engineer-
ing at GEAR made. He wanted to make sure the organization knew that we
were taking the process improvement project seriously. He wanted everyone
in the organization to know we were committed to its success, and understand
that if they were assigned a task on the process improvement project that it
held the same high priority just as any task they would get with a project that
had an external customer. This remark, I believe, he made in response to my
comments about NANO where the process improvement project priority
always seemed to be on the bottom of the list. A process improvement effort
only works if people in the organization assigned to process tasks self-manage
their time and meet their assigned process task commitments.
When I was making my recommendation for running the working groups as
threads
through multiple CMMI Process Areas, I pointed out how this
approach supported the VP's desire to let the organization know we were
