Manage-Wise

People issues impact project stability

A review of postmortem reports and introspection reports of most projects across maturity levels highlight the fact that the issues hurting project stability arise out of people issues. Postmortems are mostly a reactive response, done typically at the closure of a project to glean lessons learned and opportunities for improvement. Introspections are mostly a proactive response, done real-time during project execution to effect the necessary in-course corrections. We will explore a few of these issues, along with an understanding of how the People CMM might have a process based response to address them.

High churn resulting from no active retention policies—which staffing and compensation process areas of the People CMM reasonably addresses.

Inability to ensure that productively employed individuals engaged in work activities with a competency focus—there is a significant focus on the word competency within the People CMM. The definition for competency in the People CMM is much broader in scope and includes knowledge, skills, and process abilities. Such an expanded definition for competency is a significant reason why it is beneficial to integrate the People CMM practices into the execution of a process-based model such as the CMMI.

Lack of recognition of individual competencies leading to a decay of unit level competencies starts a vicious circle that promotes mediocrity. Individuals who possess the necessary competencies, but work in a system that lacks good competency based practices do not highlight their own individual abilities to perform, and as a result, the unit has a lot to lose from such a lack of visibility into individuals’ true capability. Several practices, competency development, career development, and continuous capability improvement adequately address such issues.

Lack of guidance from experienced individuals in the organization, such as mentors or coaches, to help make informed decisions on alternative approaches—the notion of having competency based assets and mentoring at Level 4 in the People CMM helps build that experience base into the organization (competency communities) which the CMMI somehow does not adequately represent.

Project stability is diminished because employees care enough about professional development, and they tend to seek opportunities wherever available. Therefore, it again goes back to effecting positive workforce practices using competency development, career development, and aligning them with unit and organizational workforce plans.

Breakdown of coordination among support functions such as HR, staffing, and delivery functions which are responsible for ensuring project execution due to just-in-time staffing requirements. Staffing and workforce planning are the two key process areas, which enable mitigating effects from such misalignments.

Lack of an appropriate compensation strategy to attract, to retain, and to nurture talent creates instability in projects. Employees like to work in caring or in less hostile work environments. Although having a process, which aligns to the CMMI, is a necessary condition, it is not sufficient to operate at a high process maturity / capability. Competency erosion has a cascading effect, as people leave only in hordes. The best knowledge transfer and resulting documentation is thus no substitute for their eroded competency.

Focus on goals

There is a lot to gain from the commonality between the two models—the CMMI and the People CMM. To begin with, the structure of the two models or frameworks promotes institutionalization and implementation of the necessary process with its rigor based on goals of the process areas.

Within the CMMI, the presence of generic goals enables process capability, and in the People CMM, it is the last goal of each process area that helps institutionalize the process area within the work culture. The process areas in both the frameworks promote the building of both process maturity and workforce capability using complementary practices.

In this book, we will only explore what these complementary practices are at the process area level. However, if we look deeper into the two models, we can notice a significant amount of such complementary benefits accruing from an overlap at both the practice and goal levels. Such an in depth comparison merits a book of its own. Let us now explore how shoehorning works. In other words, how the CMMI and the People CMM process areas interweave with which to exploit the resulting synergy. Process areas in bold face belong to the People CMM.

Estimation process

The cluster of staffing, workforce planning, empowered workgroups positively influence project management practices embodied in the process areas of the CMMI. Staffing practices such as balancing resources and establishing individual commitments to the plan, and to the process after work analysis helps improve the estimation process.

Although it is essential to have an estimation process, performing a work analysis is critical to understanding and matching skill profiles of individuals and the skill requirements on projects with the estimation process to make sense of the estimates.

I believe it is important to tie the estimation process with competencies of individuals as there is a strong correlation between competencies and the estimates for effort and schedule. The next important workforce practice addressed in staffing is of orderly selection and transition of individuals into and out of work assignments. This helps build the necessary work products such as transition documents, where assignment of individuals to tasks is only after a thorough orientation to the work involved.

Even when competencies to execute a new line of business might exist, it is possible that without strong practices inspired from the People CMM, such as strategic hiring, it is possible to overlook developing new lines of business resulting from competency incubation. For example, an organization we worked with recently had excellent ERP competencies in SAP, Oracle, besides dealing with Internet Technologies. Strategic hiring of a banking specialist helped augment and promote these fundamental competencies into establishing a new line of business around BASEL II compliance through competency incubation and competency integration.

Participatory culture

Goals of communication and coordination process area facilitate information communication down and across, up and among stakeholders which helps build participatory culture. Interweaving of competencies with competency integration helps establish the necessary practices to support integrated teaming and organizational environment for integration process areas of the CMMI.

Formal learning relationships established with mentoring promotes team and workgroup development which helps build process areas addressing integrated product and process development of the CMMI.

Work environment process area affects the ability to perform institutionalization practice of the CMMI where the physical working conditions and resources provided to individuals helps perform individual and team tasks without distractions.

Excerpt from ‘Making Sense of Software Quality Assurance’ by Raghav S Nandyal. Reproduced with permission © 2007, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. Price: Rs 695.
E-mail: Vishwanath_Ghanekar@ mcgraw-hill.com