Top 10 project failures - The 2010 Survey Results

1. Changes to Project Scope (Scope Creep) [Third year in a row!]
2. Resources are Inadequate (Excluding Funding)
3. Insufficient Time to Complete the Project
4. Critical Requirements are Unspecified or Missing [Up four from last year!]
5. Inadequate Project Testing
6. Critical Project Tasks are Delivered Late
7. Key Team Members Lack Adequate Authority
8. The Project Sponsor is Unavailable to Approve Strategic Decisions
9. Insufficient Project Funding [Down two from last year!]
10. Key Team Members Lack Critical Skills

3 out of 10 main issues are P-CMM related

Implementing Agile with the People-CMM

More and more organizations are adopting Agile ways of working. The descriptions of Agile methodologies give much guidance on how to manage on a team level. But there is limited information on changes needed at higher level in the organizations. Also, Agile assumes that an organization has a professional workforce, which is managed and supported in such a way that it is able to do its work effectively. But there is only limited information in today’s agile methods on how to develop and manage this workforce.

The People Capability Maturity Model ® (P-CMM) helps organizations to establish and improve their workforce, and assure that the right conditions are established for teams to excel their performance. This posting describes how to deploy the P-CMM to support Agile. It gives a roadmap of P-CMM process areas that an organization can implement as a start, to reap quick business benefits. The process areas do not replace Agile methods; they are used additional to the Agile methods to support their implementation. A more detailed description of the People-CMM roadmap for Agile can be found in an article published in Software Quality Professional.

Some of the problems that organizations that implement Agile experience are

■Communication difficulties between new Agile teams and the existing line organization
■Problems in fulfilling the higher work environment demands from Agile teams
■Difficulties establishing ways to reward and support team culture, behaviour and results
■Assuring the availability of the right competencies and skills, in time when teams need it
■They have to find new ways to share and re-use knowledge and experience across teams
■Existing management styles that conflict with the agile principles

The core of the roadmap consists of 3 process areas, Staffing, Communication and Coordination and Participatory Culture. Staffing assures the availability of teams of professionals, Communication and Coordination assures that they have the right information, and are able to collaborate effectively and Participatory Culture empowers teams and enables them to take effective decisions. The practices in these 3 process areas support each other and therefore should be aligned as much as possible. They are the base for 3 other process areas. Compensation rewards the teams for their contribution towards the company results, where Work Environment provides them with the means needed to work efficiently and Competency Development enables them to continuously improve themselves to deliver value .

The People-CMM roadmap for Agile has been published is an article in Software Quality Professional. The article helps an organization to focus upon the critical people issues that need to be addressed when migrating to Agile. It also describes how the changes can be implemented in an Agile way, enabling a flexible organization that is able to continuously improve.

Author: Ben Linders

Is this a result of an Anglo American management style?

Seventy per cent of UK citizen believe that they could do a better job than their boss, a study has revealed.
In the poll of 9,000 workers in 52 countries, the British emerged as the most critical in the world – with only 18 per cent believing their boss is ‘more capable’ than they are.
Another 41 per cent describe their boss as ‘totally incompetent’. Only one in ten say their boss is ‘brilliant’.

This compares starkly with attitudes of workers in other countries, particularly in the Far East.
In China, almost a third said their boss was ‘brilliant’ and only 15 per cent questioned their competency. Indian workers were the second-most impressed.
Many British workers do not believe their boss values their contribution, cares about their wellbeing

But despite their unhappiness, one in four Britons remain in their jobs because they do not feel there are better ones to move to.

How to start a movement

In Dutch: Herman Wijffels over sociale innovatie

Leaders wanted

Managers are managing mainly on chats, rumors and speculations. The key to leadership.

Why do so few follow the P-CMM?

In the LinkedIn People CMM workgroup, a discussion was started by Tom Neff on why so few follow the P-CMM? Below his original question, and the reaction that I have posted based on things that we discussed in our P-CMM workgroup meetings. Reactions are welkome!

Why do so few follow the P-CMM? By Tom Neff:

The CMMI has gained fair acceptance around the world...even in some companies that might have to take the model and amend it to fit their situation. However, I believe most CMMI efforts either fail or fall way short of their full potential.

The last time I checked, 100% of all companies in the world have at least one employee. However, much closer to 0% of all companies are using the P-CMM. Why is that? I have come to believe that if one could successfully implement P-CMM (even just some of it) in your organization, it would SIGNIFICANTLY increase the odds of being successful with CMMI.

Given the failure rate of CMMI efforts but that you still need CMMI and you have people, it seems that one should work on P-CMM, then when the organization understands this "some change is good" thing, they'll be much more receptive to their new roles in CMMI.

Thoughts anyone?

Reaction by Ben Linders:

In the Netherlands there is a P-CMM working group, which is part of SPIder (the Dutch official Software Process Improvement Network, SPIN). We started in april 2009 and had a full day session with Gian Wemyss of the SEI in june (again thanks Gian for helping us that day!). We had several meeting where, amongst other P-CMM topics, the low adaptation level was discussed. Causes that were mentioned often were that only very few professionals and organizations know the model, there is very few information about the business benefits that the P-CMM has brought to organizations, and deploying the P-CMM is not always that easy.

As mentioned earlier the P-CMM is mostly know by the same professionals that have used the CMM(I). However these are mainly software development professionals, while the P-CMM is a management/HRM model. We have several HR and Management professionals in our working group, and are putting effort in promoting the model in HRM communities and getting (senior) managemenmt attention for the model, and its application.

There is only limited information of companies that have used the P-CMM, and most of that information is either confidential or there is insufficient detail in the publicly available information. That makes it very difficult to convince people that using the P-CMM can bring benefits. Also, there has been a shift in the goal why organizations (would) use the P-CMM. The initial business cases stressed the need to keep professionals, and keep then motivated as a main reason to deploy the People CMM. But in the economic crises, there are often other reasons to use the People CMM, like improving the quality of product and customer service. Differents goals to use the People CMM require different business cases; and since there are so few available many organizations will hesitate to use the model.

Finally, many of our working group meetings focused on getting a good understanding of the People CMM model, and discussing ways to deploy it. We learned a lot in the workgroup meeting, but it also became clear that the state of practice of the People CMM is still very premature. To state it otherwise, the maturity of using the P-CMM is very low, and there are very few people who are capable of deploying the model. There is a big need to share experiences of using the model (and any other People based practices/models), which we as a workgroup will continue to do in our regular meetings.

We have setup a website to exchange experiences at http://www.workforcematurity.nl , and started a blog at http://people-cmm.blogspot.com/ . Since we are a Dutch working groups, part of the material are in Dutch; our apologies for that, we try to publish as much as possible in English but if we run across good things in Dutch then we also share them on our website and blog. You are all welcome to join our discussions on the web. If you are living in the Netherlands, I welcome you to join our working group, which are free of charge (this is by professionals, for professionals, helping each other).

I am looking forward to reactions on this? Do you see similar reasons why the P-CMM is used so little, or other reasons?