Rming Blog

Organization Z’s Second Assessment: Summary of Achievements
A second assessment, conducted two years after the first, rated Organization Z’s maturity level at Level 3. The responses to the concerns raised by the first assessment already discussed in Section Organization Z’s Post-Assessment Efforts were judged successful. As a result, the organization had made project managers accountable [...]

Organization Z organized a retreat, devised a post-assessment plan, and parceled out assignments for implementing it. In the following, we concentrate on a few significant parts of that implementation and correlate three of its most important concerns with the relevant findings of an informal CBA IPI (or health check) conducted one year after the original [...]

A Step-by-Step Case History of How Organization Z Transformed Assessment Recommendations into Action Items, Implemented Improvements, and Conducted Subsequent Assessment and Improvement Cycles over a Four-Year Period
This section traces the history of how Organization Z after a multi-year plan of disciplined periodic assessments advanced from CMM Level 2 to Level 5 and improved its [...]

The Role of Senior Management in Implementing Improved Processes
Learning to Ask the Right Questions
As with post-assessment improvement planning, the role of senior management begins with learning to ask real questions and then expecting them to be answered.
If at monthly meetings senior management continues to ask only about profit and schedule, the organization [...]

The Principles of Building a Post-Assessment Process Improvement Action Plan
After an organization has taken a deep breath and organized itself to follow up the findings and recommendations of an assessment, step one is for the authorities and structures outlined previously to lay out and implement a one-year action plan, with another assessment or "health [...]

The organization wants to improve as soon as possible. However, it is important to establish what needs to be done first and in what sequence to do the rest. After an assessment, things can still go seriously wrong.
Going too slow or too fast are equally dangerous. Taking more than a month or two to [...]

Post-assessment process improvements need to be driven by senior management to succeed. There is no substitute for a managing director’s or a president’s authority, commitment, and resources.
Senior management, however, must be not only committed but also informed. Senior managers need to learn what questions to ask and how to ask better ones as the [...]

Introduction: After an Assessment
After an assessment, either euphoria or shock reigns. Both should quickly give way to a disciplined plan to build on the momentum of the assessment and to follow up its findings and recommendations by putting in place an organization to institute necessary changes. If too much time passes, this momentumand an [...]

An assessment wrap-up is an informal meeting between the members of the assessment team devoted to discussing lessons learned, completing any required SEI feedback forms, and talking about ways to improve before the next assessment.
Three major goals are associated with an assessment wrap-up:

To complete the transmission of assessment results to the assessed organization, [...]

In some assessments (especially when there has been no executive pre-briefing), the president or managing director and his staff may want to ask the assessment team questions about the substance of the presented final findings after the meeting is over. This request should always be honored, as explanation can only help. A post-presentation executive session [...]

The final findings presentation is a key mechanism for transitioning ownership of the assessment findings back to the organization. This is accomplished partly when the people in the organization recognize that their feedback during the draft findings meeting has been incorporated into the final findings.
The final findings presentation delivers the assessment’s results to the [...]

No matter how hard senior managers try to keep the long-term goals of their organization in mind, it is only natural for them to have their heart set on achieving a "good" rating. If they have scheduled a Level 3 assessment, they want to be Level 3. In some cases, they have told their corporate [...]

Final findings presentations include information such as the number and type of interviews held, the number of questionnaire participants, an account of the assessment process, a list of projects investigated in depth, strengths and weaknesses of KPAs/PAs investigated, and the KPA/PA profile.
After rating is completed, the team revises (beginning with the first KPA/PA) all [...]

Although this article is not primarily concerned with assessments based on the CMMI continuous representation, it may be useful to review the differences that exist between this kind of SCAMPI and the ones discussed previously.
Rating
When using the CMMI continuous representation model (rather than the CMMI staged representation model), the team is not rating [...]

Assessment teams use the same decision-making process for ratings as they did in previous consolidationsthey do it by consensus. However, although the final consensus should represent an easy and logical last deduction from the numerous moments of consensus that have preceded it, occasionally this is not the case, for reasons that are infrequently discussed but [...]

Tracing from Initial Questions to Final Findings
1.0 Interview Stage: Questions Asked and Answers Noted
Project Managers Questions
Question 1: Can you explain how you estimate the size of the product?
PM 1: My software manager does that, and all I see is the manpower figure.
PM 2: Sure, we calculate how many people we [...]

Assessments culminate with the rating of individual KPA/PAs and the establishment of a global maturity level rating for the organization, which is the end of a long process. This book has concentrated throughout on staged process improvement models, which result in a single maturity level rating for the organization, and that emphasis is maintained here. [...]

Although nothing is presented at a draft findings meeting that has not already been offered (at least twice) by members of the organization, the big picture can often come as a surprise to the organization, provoking vociferous opposition, especially from middle-level managers. In these cases, the draft finding meeting may turn into a free-for-all.
Managers [...]

The SCAMPI procedure requires at least one draft findings session. However, it is best if there are two or more draft findings sessions. One session should be for practitioners, and the second should be for project, middle, and senior managers (but not the assessment sponsor). If there is concern that project managers cannot be entirely [...]

Provisional final consolidation observations are presented back to the participants who have provided the information on which they are based at a draft findings meeting, which usually takes place the day before the last day of an assessment.
Draft findings presentations are provided for all those who have been interviewed during the assessment. The purpose [...]

The following is a sample of items typically covered in a draft findings presentation. Each assessment team will create draft findings in the format appropriate to the organization.
Draft Findings PresentationA Sample Template
Title of slide:
Name of assessed organization.
Assessment dates.
Model scope:
Indicate the process areas included in the assessment data collection. Each [...]

Draft findings are a provisional description of all the strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s assessed processes, and they constitute the end product of the assessment team’s data-gathering and consolidation activities.
The team should especially highlight those weaknesses that represent a real risk to the organization. A vital goal of any assessment is to help [...]

At the end of an assessment, after interviewing is finished, the assessment team must (1) consolidate its provisional observations and (2) present them to an assembly of the organization in a draft (or preliminary) findings meeting, which asks the organization to verify the accuracy of the findings; the team must then (3) consolidate the confirmed [...]

The organization provides a set of objective evidence of practices that fulfill the CMMI objectives at the beginning of the assessment, and the team verifies whether those practices have been implemented. For project-level practices, the team must confirm that each selected project is implementing these practices. For practices at the organizational level, the team must [...]

SCAMPI places a heavy emphasis on methodically planning and tracking data collected during the assessment. The extensive pre-onsite document review allows the team members (if they choose) to narrow the onsite search for new information. This front-loaded work ( "The Assessment Team Begins to Review Documents") helps the team develop an understanding of the information [...]

The two recurring problems just discussed are part of a longer list that experienced Lead Assessors should anticipate during consolidation sessions. The Lead Assessor’s strategies for resolving them will play a large part in defining whether the assessment is successful.
A group of very serious problems of this sort will be discussed in regard to [...]

During the middle stages of an assessment, it is easy for an assessment team to regard the process of consolidation as a mechanical exercise that can be put off until later. If it is already late in the day, the team may wonder why consolidation has to be done now. But too little early discussion [...]

Consolidation must be the product of team consensus. Consensus first allows team members to feel genuine ownership of recommended solution and then gives their recommendations a real authority when they are considered by the organization at large.
The general characteristics of consensus are:

Common basis of understanding.
General agreement on a clear alternative to which [...]

Consolidation is an iterative process that continues throughout the assessment.
It is to be recalled that in the early stages of an assessment not much data relevant to the components of the model will be collected. However, relevant data continues to accumulate as the assessment progresses. The focus of the document review changes over the [...]

Observations may be recorded in one of several ways. They can be written on sticky notes attached to a KPA/PA wall chart or, more efficiently, written as additions to electronic KPA/PA worksheets. Electronic worksheets for managing the observations are generated from team members’ notes; Excel spreadsheets or Word tables are very effective (see Worksheet Example [...]

An Example of Different Kinds of Note Taking
The following example illustrates notes taken by two team members and shows how they are transformed into observations. Frequently notes contain information that affects more than one practice in one PA. As is usual, note-taking ability differs from one team member to the next. (In this particular [...]