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 will not change. The message such meetings send to middle management is: "Do whatever you have to do to meet the schedules. Quality isn’t important." But quality is importantin fact, it is the best way to improve a company’s predictability and its long-term profits.
"Executive questions provide insight into organizational priorities. It’s nice that the process improvement sponsor asks process-related questions in the monthly steering committee meeting, but what kind of questions is the senior management team asking in project reviews… Some still growl things like:
- "Whose fault is it that the project’s behind schedule?"
- "Who do I chew out/demote/fire to fix these problems?"
- "Given the state of the project, why didn’t I see many cars here on Saturday?"
"Although these questions may reflect senior management’s real concerns, the executives need to start asking questions that reflect their new and improved process-oriented view of the world. The kinds of questions that senior management should ask are things like:
- "How could the process be changed to avoid these problems in the future?"
- "How can issues like this be identified when they’re still just risks, and subsequently mitigated?"
- "How do we communicate the painful lessons identified on this project to benefit others?"
"Admittedly, when faced with a crisis, senior management must act decisively to contain the situation. After all, when a man is drowning, it’s no time to teach him to swim. But once the man is safely on the beach, rather than chastising his stupidity, it is usually more beneficial to explore how a similar situation might be avoided in the futureand then discuss how the efficiency of the rescue operation might be improved."
"Bottom line: senior management influences behavior based on the questions they ask. Furthermore, they change behavior when they insist on getting the answers. The executive question is a powerful tool that can be used to send a strong signal that expectations are changing…or it can be wasted getting answers like ‘right Roger!’" .
Extending the Authority of Senior Management Without Diluting It
To be effective, structuring improvement requires systematic communication between senior management, the SEPG or process improvement group, and developers. Clear communication must establish how these groups will work together on the improvement plan and afterwards.
A viable management structure capable of introducing real process improvement might look like this one (in which all parts of the organization participate in process improvement and in which the entire organizational is linked back to senior management).
An executive board whose role is to review and approve potential improvements in any area of the organization.
An overall process steering group whose role is to manage, coordinate, and review activities across the organization.
Individual department process groups, such as engineering process groups, operations process groups, human resources process groups, etc., whose role is to coordinate the individual departments’ improvement activities. These department process groups should include the managers of the appropriate department.
The activities for each group are reviewed periodically and monthly with senior management.
How to Create a Workable Ladder of Authority: An Example
Organization R, attempting to drive process improvement efficiently, created a process improvement structure tailored to its multi-disciplined matrix organization. The president extended his authority to drive the accomplishment of specific improvements, including in customer satisfaction, cycle time, defect reduction, and annual growth rate, to the VP executive staff and then to a board of overseers. Process steering groups were then established within each functional group.
Backed by the authority of executive management, the board of overseers (in fact a subset of the executive staff) coordinated the process steering groups and working groups beneath them. The board identified areas that needed to be changed and then defined and initiated process improvement initiatives in those areas. It made sure that coordination and cooperation occurred across functional boundaries. The board members became actively involved in the steering groups and ensured that continuous process improvement methodologies were implemented across all business processes.
The board of overseers thus became a coordinating body for the executive staff and a focal point of process improvement throughout the organization. The board met monthly to perform executive reviews of performance and process improvement. These reviews, when held in conjunction with monthly program reviews, made process improvement a part of project performance improvement, both of which were accountable all the way up the organization. Every month, every project manager had to show a chart indicating the red, yellow, or green status of process and product performance. Process group members became a part of each project, and the projects were required to maintain their awareness of process improvement.
The structure’s principle function is to guarantee senior management’s full involvement in the improvement process. In effect, it meant that the president presided over a standard "stoplight" reporting system for each project. If the status of a project was yellow or red, the project manager had to explain to the executive staff (president and executive VPs) at the monthly program reviews what was wrong and what he planned to do to bring the project under control. For each color, measurement limits were determined. If the project measurements exceeded the limit, the project moved from one color range to the next.
It is vital in the structure that the project manager rather than the software manager explain to the president why a particular area is yellow or red and provide quality measurements (in the form of defect charts) in the reporting. If this duty is assigned to a software manager (who often does not possess the authority to address the problem), the project manager is absolved of full responsibility, and the chain breaks.
The Role of Process Groups in Immature Organizations
In Watts Humphrey’s words, process groups such as SEPGs "serve as a consolidating force for the changes that have already been made and should support the projects as they use new methods, standards, and technology. This support helps with the adoption of new practices and facilitates their retention in the working fabric of the organization. Without such guidance and support, lasting process improvement is practically impossible" . Or, in Kim Caputo’s words, SEPGs drive and facilitate the way an "organization learns from itself" .
It should be kept in mind, however, that the foundations for efficient process group activity are not established before the changes in management structure the CMM/CMMI associates with Maturity Level 3. (The process group activities appear in organization process focus and organization process definition PAs/KPAs in both CMM/CMMI models at Level 3.)
Before that, process groups are useful but only up to a point. At Maturity Levels 1 and 2, process groups help project management and project staff members articulate their current procedures. The process group can also help organize working groups across projects when requested by project personnel. But before Level 3, process groups cannot be expected to develop organization-wide processes because at that level the organization is not capable of agreeing on what processes projects should use. The projects barely understand which processes work for them and which need improving.
The danger, then, of expecting Level 3 functions from a Level 1 process group is that the process group will try to impose activities that have no meaning to the people in the organization. The process group activities will be marginalized and seen as having no relationship to the projects and to delivering the products to the customers. Therefore it is important for the process group in a Level 1 organization to ensure that the projects understand that whatever activities the process group performs it is to assist the projects and not to dictate to or hamper them.
The appropriate use of a process group in a Level 1 company can be seen in the following example:
After a first assessment, Organization X began to implement its improvement program by creating a process group made up of the software project managers and one full-time process improvement manager. One of the SEPG’s tasks was to design a template for a software project plan. Although each project in the organization had created some variety of such a plan, they all were different and all were missing pieces. The software managers decided that they should all work together to create a common template. They asked the process improvement manager to help make this happen. He formed a working group using software managers, whether they served on the SEPG or not. Eventually the template was tested and implemented, but only because the effort came from and took place in the projects. Had the template been entirely the product of an independent SEPG, the effort would never have worked.
A counter-example: The engineering director of another Level 1 organization set up an SEPG and assigned members of the SEPG to lead and participate in the working groups that were to write procedures for each area. There was little representation from the projects on the working groups. The procedures were written within a year, but the projects never used them. The year was wasted, and the process improvement program was set back many more.
This effort might have worked within a Level 2 organization moving to Level 3 because a Level 2 organization by definition recognizes the value of articulating and building on existing processes and how difficult it is to try to articulate new processes from scratch. It has also created a depository for measurement data and lessons learned. Without these foundations, projects view working groups as extraneous and distracting.