The Opening Meeting
At an opening meeting, the assessment sponsor explains to his organization why he has authorized the assessment and what he expects from his people. Depending on the maturity of the organization, the kick-off meeting can last from 30 minutes to one hour. In more mature organizations that have experienced prior assessments, the details of what will happen during the assessment are already known, and the meeting concerns developments since the last assessment and improvement plans for the next year.
The assessment sponsor, the assessment team members, and all assessment participants must attend the opening meeting. Anyone else whom the sponsor wants to invite can also attend the opening meeting. A broad participation of the organization can enhance understanding and buy-in of the assessment results.
The organization site coordinator keeps track of which assessment participants are able to attend the opening meeting and those who can’t come. If a person who is to be interviewed misses the assessment participants briefing or the opening meeting, he will need to be specially briefed before his interview.
The logistics for the opening meeting are discussed in advance between the Lead Assessor and the organization site coordinator so that an appropriate room can be scheduled, attendees can be invited, and any other details can be handled, including audio and video equipment.
After the sponsor finishes his portion of the opening meeting, the Lead Assessor should present the members of the assessment team. Each team member introduces himself or herself and makes a short statement about his or her background.
The objectives of the opening meeting are to display senior management sponsorship for the assessment clearly and to supply necessary information. Topics addressed should include the assessment principles (above all, confidentialityparticipants must not feel threatened, no matter what they say) and the assessment’s objectives. The latter will include a summary of assessment activities conducted to date, an account of activities that are about to occur, the kinds of questions they will be asked, and something about the general conduct of the interviews. The participants are also given an up-to-date schedule of the assessment.
The senior manager must make it absolutely clear that he or she is the sponsor of the assessment and that he or she fully supports the assessment and subsequent improvement efforts. He or she should make sure that the assessment is one of the organization’s top priorities for the onsite period and should insist that people who are scheduled to be interviewed must be available at the scheduled time. The sponsor must also (publicly and privately) encourage the assessment participants to be open and forthcoming and must explain why this is important. Without such a display of sponsorship at the highest level, the authority of the assessment team can be challenged and undermined.
The sponsor must set the opening meeting as an important event on his or her calendar. Although technically the SEI acknowledges that it might be sufficient "to read a letter of sponsorship from a senior site manager" at the opening meeting, this is recommended only in extreme circumstances. If the senior manager does not take the assessment seriously enough to be present at the opening meeting, why should anyone else take it seriously?
In one assessment, the managing director was unable to attend the opening meeting because he was called to corporate headquarters at the last minute. However, he arranged for two-way videoconferencing equipment both at the assessment site and at the corporate headquarters site. He opened the meeting and listened to the Lead Assessor’s presentation and to his organization’s responses. It probably was the next best thing to him actually being there. The people in the organization understood the trouble he had gone to and got the message that the assessment was important.
On another occasion, the assessment involved an organization that was used to working by telephone conferencing. A time for the opening meeting was selected, and everyone in the organization was required to telephone in, even if it was the middle of the night. They got the message.
Opening Meeting Features for Organizations with Little Assessment Experience
If the organization has little assessment or process improvement experience, the opening meeting should also review the fundamental concepts of the software improvement model on which the assessment is based. Explaining how much (or how little) interviewees need to know about the practices of the model can be very useful. Organizations that are struggling with concepts at the repeatable level (Maturity Level 2) especially will gain from full explanations, while such explanations don’t need to be as thorough for organizations at or near the managed level (Maturity Level 3) and defined level (Maturity Level 4).
Other Presentations
Presentations by the organization to the assessment team can be useful at the beginning of an onsite assessment. Many organizations arrange 30- to 60-minute presentations by project managers about their projects, demonstrations by project teams of what they produce, and briefings by department managers about how they run their departments and how they interact with other departments. Also useful are presentations by directors about organizational strengths and weaknesses or by process improvement managers about future plans.
These kinds of presentations set the stage for the interviews to come, and they also help organization personnel to relax. In addition, they give managers and developers a forum to voice their most important concerns at the beginning of the assessment.
When project managers are later interviewed, they are usually more open about their work because they have already established a connection to the members of the team.
Sometimes it is also useful to arrange short demonstrations or presentations from a few people from the assessed project, even though they are not scheduled to be interviewed. Establishing a connection with as many people as possible in the assessed projects helps the entire organization to "buy in" to the assessment.