Do Process Improvement Models Matter?
February 2nd 2008
Do Models Matter?
As the days creep closer to this year’s SEPG conference, I’m thinking about how much I enjoyed participating in the European SEPG plenary panel, “Staged versus Continuous Models, Is There a Winner”. As a panel participant, my hope was that the panel would inspire the audience to ask questions that they may not have thought about in the past. Questions about the role that software process improvement models play in delivering software more expeditiously, less expensively, and with greater reliability.
Questions such as:
The answers to these two questions depend on many factors, with a primary factor being prevailing culture. For example, does the organization prefer flexibility or more of a spoon feeding approach when it comes to the guidance that is offered in a model? Based on the answers, the choice of either process capablity or organizational maturity representations that the CMMI offers becomes more clear.
“My model’s better than yours” certainly leads to great discussions.
Should one pursue ITIL, ISO 9001, Trillium, TQM, Deming, Crosby, Juran, CMM, CMMI staged, CMMI continuous or a combination thereof? What’s a Software Process Improvement guru to do with all these choices?
Another question one might ask is:
Do models really matter as much as wanting to change?
I believe an organization can find goodness in all models if it exploits them in a way that supports its business and cultural needs. I also believe that if an organization doesn’t feel a compelling need for change, it will find fault in all models. Enough fault that it will dismiss all models out of hand as being useless.
If your organization really wants to improve, you’ll embrace what’s attractive to you in the model and overlook what’s of questionable value.
So, models do matter, but not nearly as much as wanting to change?
What do you think?
See you at the SEPG 2008 conference!