The best assessments generally interview a large and diverse group of people. Those interviewed range from new hires, practitioners, and team leaders to middle managers and senior executives.
Some interviews are with individuals, and some are group interviews. Generally individual interviews are limited to project managers and the president of the organization. Most other interviews are done in groups.
For a CBA IPI, the whole team must be present at all first-time interviews. For a SCAMPI, this is desirable but not required.
Selecting People to Be Interviewed: Senior and Middle Management
Managers above the rank of project manager with some (but not direct) connection to the projects to be assessed are not technically required to be interviewed by the CBA IPI / SCAMPI rules, but interviewing them anyway is highly desirable because subsequent process improvement efforts depend on senior and middle managers’ understanding of assessment results and on their sense of having been part of the assessment process. They are interviewed not to obtain technical information but rather to understand the context of the organization’s operations and improvement efforts.
Examples of managers who might be interviewed are finance, human resources, contract, engineering, or program executives.
Senior managers should be interviewed in one group and middle managers in the other, and these interviews should take place near the end of the assessment so that they have a chance to discuss trends that have already been reported. (But a manager and his subordinate should not be interviewed together.)
It is recommended that a president, managing director, or general manager be interviewed individually.
Selecting People to Be Interviewed: Project Managers
Project managers from representative projects need to be interviewed. This means most obviously the managers of the projects that have been selected for in-depth evaluation, but others may be included as well.
The project manager of each project is interviewed separately. In no case should he or she be interviewed with subordinates.
Also it is important to interview those who function as project managers as well as those who actually have the title. On large, complex projects, the project manager may be removed from the day-to-day management of the development, and development responsibilities may be distributed between several lower-level managers, who must also be interviewed. In still other cases, it may be necessary to interview functional managers as well, such as the software manager, systems manager, configuration manager, test manager, quality assurance manager, and so on.
Selecting People to Be Interviewed: Technical Groups
Technical employees performing the same job on different projects should be interviewed together as a group. (It is also good to include some individuals from non-assessed projects.)
Generally each group interview should have four to six participants.
In planning for the assessment, it is best to include as many individuals involved in the chosen projects as possible in the appropriate interview sessions. As a result, more people will feel that they have been given a chance to have their say. Also the organization will get a broader and more objective view of what its employees perceive.
The side benefit of putting people from different projects together (e.g., requirements developers) is that they have a chance to learn how other projects in different parts of the organization are handling common issues.
When there is a possibility of interviewing more than one individual from a given project, the following criteria apply. Interviewees ideally should:
- Be practitioners, not managers or staff.
- Include opinion leaders.
- Have the interpersonal skills required to facilitate the free flow of information.
- Be representative of types of people in the organization.
- Not include any two individuals that have a reporting relationship.