My Top 5 Process Areas

The back-of-the-envelope analysis I yakked about in my last diary entry yielded five PAs that I should "Probably" address soon. In this post, I'll count them down in some sort of rough, reverse priority order. (Think American Top 40... without music.)

Remember, these are my top five PAs, not necessarily yours. I determined these by thinking through my company's critical, near-term business priorities. Unless you're my clone, your short list of PAs probably won't be the same as mine. (If you are my clone, please contact me ASAP. I may have a job for you.)

Here, then, are my top PAs:

• NUMBER 5. Decision Analysis and Resolution (DAR). This nifty little PA might be a shocker coming in all the way up at #5 on the charts. After all, it's considered an advanced support PA, typically building on the more basic support PAs like the one we'll find at #4. Yet, this is a low-hanging fruit with potentially incredible bang-for-the-buck. Why is it important for me? Well, I make tons of choices as a small business owner, and success often hinges not so much on doing these things well (yes, that's part of it), but on picking the right things to do in the first place (i.e., emphasizing effectiveness over efficiency). There are many areas where I can use help weeding through alternatives. In fact, I just used key elements of this PA a few weeks ago to help select my 2009 training room supplier. Here's a sanitized spreadsheet. (I'll spend tens of thousands of dollars on my public training rooms/catering in 2009; the half-a-day or so that it took to compare four alternatives and make sure I chose the "best" was unquestionably worthwhile.)
  

• NUMBER 4. Measurement and Analysis (MA). I do use measurements now, but adding rigor to my data analysis in key business areas can definitely boost my bottom line. How? Let's continue with the training class example. I know how to fill a public training class -- if I throw a bunch of money at the problem and make Google rich in the process. So, critical for me in 2009 is not just filling my classes, but actually making money while filling my classes. If I don't learn how to do this effectively (and most companies don't), then I wave bye-bye to public training in 2010. There's a wealth of data that can help me with this - traffic to my website, sources of that traffic, costs to generate my visitors, and so on. I'd be a moron if I never looked at this. (Believe me, I have.) But I haven't done a rigorous GQM (Goal-Question-Metric) type of analysis to make sure I'm collecting and analyzing all of the data I need to accomplish my business goals.
  

• NUMBER 3. Service System Development (SSD). My choice of this PA could be a surprise to some folks who already have a basic familiarity with CMMI-SVC, simply because it's considered an addition to the model. In other words, you could comply with the CMMI for Services without implementing this PA. If you've been following this blog, though, you realize that I'm not so concerned with compliance; instead, I'm concerned about using the CMMI-SVC for improved business performance. The "service" system I'll be focusing on won't be my system for providing consulting services or delivering training. Why not those? Honestly, I'm not feeling any pain there. Sure, I guess I could improve -- we all could-- but my customers historically have been happy with my service. (And even if they weren't, would I admit that here?) But there is one area where I can improve massively, and I'm not even sure that this "service" was explicitly considered by the people who crafted the model. I'll talk about this in a future diary entry.
  

• NUMBER 2. Project Monitoring and Control (PMC). Let me be honest with you: the reason I stuck this PA on the list is because its sister PA came in at Number 1. To address the soon-to-be-revealed Number 1 PA without addressing PMC at the same time (or very soon afterwards) would be like Van Halen without David Lee Roth. (Sorry, Hagar fans!) In other words, it would be doable, yet somehow not quite as satisfying (and with a bit too much synthesizer).
  

Now, the moment of truth... the number one, highest priority Process Area my business needs to address:

• NUMBER 1. Project Planning (PP). My gaps here are so glaring I'm not sure where to begin, and I don't even know how much I should share. After all, I could come across looking like the typical "Level 1" company that I am. A capable one, mind you... but one that is strongly hero-driven. A company that's doing just fine, thank you... but will never ever grow without significant pain. I provide services -- good services, I think. But a lack of planning limits my ability to provide more services, to a greater number of customers. I don't consistently estimate how long it will take me to do things [SP 1.3]... I just jump right in and do them! I don't explicitly consider risks [SP 2.2] ... thank goodness I've never gotten gravely ill the day before a public class. There's no formal concept of a lifecycle [SP 1.4] in anything I do! I could go on, but I'm growing weary of this self-flagellation. (If this Diary is going to be successful, though, transparency is critical. Gulp!) In short: I've been a very effective doer, but for my little company to grow I need to become a much more effective planner.

So there you have my Top 5 PAs. It's clear to me what I need to address first. There's problem, though. I do lots and lots of things throughout a typical day. I can't begin to address Project Planning unless I can clearly answer one fundamental question. In fact, as I type these words I'm not sure I can provide a good answer, at least not in the context of specifically what I do day to day.

• What is a project?

Hmmm... time to stop typing and start thinking.

(Truth be told, time to start packing for four fun-filled days in Florida. Then, time to think about it next Wednesday.)

How We Selected Our Initial PAs

So far we've:

• decided to adopt the CMMI for Services, and
• determined that because of our small size, we really can't focus on more than one or two process areas (PAs) at a time.

The Tie-in to Our Business Goals

We also feel strongly that:

• the first set of process areas we tackle must deliver immediate business value... not value in 2010, or even in the second half of 2009. We want bang-for-the-buck over the next several weeks.

One implication of our "immediate return" approach is that to understand our initial PA selection, you need some insight into our two key short-term business activities:

1. Overhaul website. We'd like to do a major reworking of our website. (For competitive reasons, we can't say much more.)
   
2. Fill public classes. We're teaching a series of public CMMI courses starting in April, and we'd like to fill those classes -- cost-effectively. (Although it was great to have 19 students in our last public Introduction to CMMI class, our current profit margins on public classes are too slim to be sustainable.)

The only CMMI-SVC PAs of interest to us right now are the ones that make it easier to accomplish at least one of those two objectives. Period, end of statement. Other PAs? Sure, we may tackle them... eventually. We just can't afford (literally) to be too concerned about them right now.

Our Selection Process

The process we used to select our PAs is hugely dependent on two key pre-requisites. If you're going to try something like this, make sure you:

• Understand the CMMI-SVC. At a minimum, take the CMMI-SVC class, either from us or another SEI Partner -- we've heard rumors we're not the only company that teaches it. (Note: the three-day CMMI-DEV class is currently a prerequisite for the one-day CMMI-SVC class, since the former covers basics that the latter assumes you already know.)
• Understand your business. Specifically, have a knowledge of organizational "pain points" -- where you believe your business is hurting right now.

Given those prerequisites, here's what we did.

1. Listed all 24 CMMI-SVC process areas.
2. Set up four categories - Probably, Maybe, Probably Not, and Definitely Not.
3. Made a preliminary assignment of each PA to one of the four categories.
4. Took a deeper look at the Probably's and Maybe's (down to the specific practice level).
   
5. Chose the PAs of most immediate value to us.
   

One simple question was used to categorize each PA (step 3):

• If we were to adopt significant portions of this PA in the next few months, would it play a major role in helping us accomplish our two key near-term business objectives?

The assignment went quickly and smoothly, helped in large part by some no-brainer additions to the Probably Not or Definitely Not categories. For example, we really wouldn't want to target any of the "advanced" PAs (like Quantitative Project Management) that build upon "basic" PAs (such as Project Planning or Project Monitoring and Control.) We also decided it wouldn't make business sense to initially target the organizational PAs (Organizational Process Focus, etc.), because they simply wouldn't give us the immediate return we're seeking.

Once we had this first cut at categorization done, we took a closer look at the Probably and Maybe PAs (step 4). We examined each of them down at the specific practice level, and came up with our final list of just a few PAs (step 5). Our next blog entry will reveal the results.