The concept “process Improvement” consists of two words, “process” and “improvement”. Therefore, its correct interpretation involves two aspects: (1) how we perform the work and (2) whether we improve in the direction defined by the organization.
Both aspects are equally important, nowadays increasingly more important.

Yesterday: ‘Big-bang’ approach

“Yesterday”, in the sense of “in the recent past”, we could distinguish three major types of companies.

• Process-oriented (traditional): those who were more interested in establishing stable, homogeneous, people-independent, controllable processes; they were adopting plan-driven methods.
• Adaptability-oriented (agile): those, who were relying mainly on highly motivated and qualified, self-organizing teams; they were adopting agile methods.
• Mixed ones: Those, not so many in total, that combine both types of methods.

No matter what type an organization was, the approach to process improvement was more or less the same, a ‘big-bang’ one:

The change that was occurring in an organization could be described like this:

An important effort is made to achieve the desired state and afterwards, it is expected to enjoy the fruits of the accomplishment for quite some time.

Today: Defining the approach for tomorrow

Nowadays we are moving to, rather living in a dynamic business and market context, in which customers are gained and retained only by the capacity to develop differentiated products and services that satisfy their particular needs quickly, faster and better than the competitors could do it. Therefore, most (perhaps all) of the companies are interested in

And, if possible, achieve all these objectives quickly and with lasting results.

Both, traditional and agile organizations meet difficulties in adapting their way of work to this context. The former struggle with defining lighter processes and modifying the strong departmental structures, responsibilities and dependencies. The latter, even if they have efficient islands within the organization, suffer the difficulties of spreading their experience to other teams.

I could not find a good summary of the difficulties plan-driven organization meet on their adaptation path. I can only share with you the problems that the organizations I have been working with meet. Here I have resumed them.

With respect to barriers and the organizational issues agile organizations face, you can turn on p. 7-8 of the 7th Annual State of Agile Development Survey by Version One.

Obviously, we need a different approach to process improvement that allows the organizations to continuously drive their initiatives towards their business goals. Thus, in my opinion, if a company really wants to achieve significant improvements in its business environment, they should first agree to pursue evolutionary improvements and then, really do it. (Kanban 1st fundamental principle).

“A journey of thousands miles begins with one step”. (Japanese proverb)

Tomorrow: Evolutionary, Lean Kanban approach

The organizations are complex systems and factors such as how the organization thinks, prioritises and makes decisions, the types and complexity of the developed products, the technologies used, the “most painful” problems currently faced, etc are important in defining the right approach to process improvement. The question is not which method we should apply, but what objective do we want to achieve and what we need to do to get it.

Lean and Kanban provide powerful means that boost organizations, step by step toward their vision.

The most fundamental change for organizations used to large scope, long-term projects, and drastic organizational modifications is that Lean and Kanban limit the scope of a process improvement  initiative to a  level that is easy to define, understand and see, reduce the time line, and do not prescribe roles and responsibilities changes until the organization itself identifies them as necessary. At the same time they pay strong attention to rapidly incorporating the gained experience in the processes.

Briefly speaking:

1. We pursue a concrete business objective (Lean, Kanban)
2. We start where we are without drastically disrupting processes, roles and organizational structures (Lean, Kanban)
3. We go in smaller steps, i.e. instead of conducting 40-50 (to put some numbers as an example) action points in several processes in parallel, we focus the attention on few activities that resolve a concrete problem acting over the root causes for it, and validating and demonstrating the effect in a relatively short time.
   Later on, we define the next improvement step taking into account the actual organizational context (that has changed after the previous improvement step) and the actual business objectives.(Lean, Six Sigma)
4. We apply simpler means to spot impediments in the processes, e.g. a kanban system, in order to be able to resolve them as soon as possible. (Lean, Kanban)
5. We keep focus on the workflow (Lean, Kanban)

As for the practices we use, they could come from Lean, as well as from any collection of best practices, agile methods, ITIL, CMMI, etc.

According to the latest Maturity Profile of CMMI Institute, from September-2013, in Spain there are currently nearly 300 CMMI certified organizations. We are on the fourth position in the world in number of CMMI certifications after the United States, China and India. Despite this, many organizations express the opinion that they expected more tangible results from their process improvement projects based on this model.

In The Focus and The Involvement, Key Elements In Improving Processes I introduce a manner of organizing an improvement initiative that I have been using the past two years to help organizations solve their operational problems and obtain CMMI certification.

An important aspect related to defining processes is the way this work is carried out. It will sound strange, but as a consultant my advice is not to let an external consultant define your processes isolated by the people who use them to perform their jobs.

Getting good results and avoiding resistance to change is only possible by putting together  company personnel’s knowledge of the organizational context and consultant’s experience in integrating relevant practices (regardless of their origin) in an adequate solution for the company.

The outcome I have seen as result of this approach is the following:

• Process improvement effort that brings real benefits to the organization in terms of better project performance and management
• People understand the reasons behind these actions, the purpose of the processes, and as they have been involved in their definition and fine tuning, they apply the practices with less or no resistance. This shortens the institutionalization time and makes processes last.
• The certificate that confirms the achievement.

I strongly recommend this approach to process improvement to any organization that is interested in getting more tangible results than a mere CMMI accreditation, and especially to those that are looking for lightweight CMMI implementation.

Forward this post to your Quality Manager and colleagues, if you think it can help getting better results from your process improvement initiative.  

Are you engaged in a process improvement initiative? Tell me about your situation and I will share my experience with you.

Related posts:

• The Focus And The Involvement, Key Elements In Improving Processes
• Kanban and CMMI
• Process Improvement: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Past week Kirk Botula, CMMI Institute CEO,  announced that “a record number of appraisals was reached in 2013”.

Spain is the 4th country in the world in number of CMMI certifications, after United States, China, and India. We should expect lots of success stories communicated.

However, what I hear in my courses and in other meetings with companies that use model is that “processes have their proper life, parallel to the real work”, “people do not see value in applying the processes”, “extra hours have to be dedicated to prepare all the documentation needed for complying to the defined processes” etc.

The experiment

To find out the reasons for the misalignment between the expected and the actual opinion, I made the following experiment in my classes. In addition to asking the audience what they expected from the course, I also asked them about what kind of problems concerning their work they hope to resolve through the CMMI model practices.

The typical answers to “What are your expectations from the course?” question are

• Understand the CMMI concepts
• Know how to apply these concepts to my work
• Understand what we have to do to achieve a maturity level X.

While when asked “What problems in your everyday work do you expect to resolve by means of CMMI?” people usually respond

• Reduce time and effort for planning and re-planning
• Improve team’s capability to manage changing requirements and varying demand
• Improve the coordination between different functions and areas
• Manage resource assignments and work load
• Manage priorities, etc.

Here you can see a couple of photos with the answers to the latter question (in Spanish).

As you can see the answers depend on where one puts the focus of the question.

The same happens with the process improvement initiatives. If they are mainly focussed on filling in the gap between the initial state and the desired one, characterised by the practices in the corresponding process areas, some real problems remain unaddressed. This leads to the unpleasant conclusion that the introduction of the new/updated processes does not bring to the organization the value they are expected to – a problem which, in my opinion, does not lie in the model itself, but in the form it is implemented.

Solution through a new approach

Over the past two years, in order to demonstrate that our process improvement effort brings real benefits to the company, I have been trying a new approach. Its premises are as follows:

1. Identify the real organization needs
2. Select one or two of the most painful points to tackle.Unless explicitly wanted by the organization, avoid doing large scope initial appraisals (e.g. SCAMPI B). Once the first improvements are on place, the organization situation will be different and we will have to act according to the new circumstances, not the ones identified several months ago. In this way we save significant time and effort for making the appraisal, preparing the initial process improvement plan and the subsequent re-plannings.
3. Focus the improvement actions on the selected problem.Use the CMMI practices as guidelines, not a must. Use practices from other methods to create the best solution for the organization. These could be Kanban, Lean, Lean Six Sigma, Theory Of Constraints (TOC), Agile methods.
4. Work with the people that use the processes.
5. Track the problem resolution and the model coverage
6. Once resolved the current problem, go to 1

I have used this approach in two occasions already. Interestingly, one of the organizations evolved from “If we have to do Peer Review, we will not go to ML3” to “Peer reviews are very useful, we have to do more of them”.

As for the other organization, we identified the problems and they chose to resolve those that were allowing them to obtain improvements in both the development and the services area.

How to you see this approach?
Feel like giving it a try? Tell me about your situation and I will share my experience with you.

No involvement no success is about my experiences on how to carry out an improvement initiative focused on the real organization’s objectives and the benefits that can be obtained.

Related posts:

• No Involvement No Success
• Kanban and CMMI
• Process Improvement: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

This post is oriented to organizations that have used CMMI as model for process definition and improvement, have (or not) achieved some maturity level, and are interested in evolving their processes to more agile, lighter and Lean-er ones. It is also oriented to Agile organizations that need to refine y formalize their processes, and/or obtain a CMMI certification.

Before going into details, it is important to understand what CMMI and Kanban are.

CMMI is “a model that contains the essential elements of effective processes for one or more areas of interest and describes an evolutionary improvement path from ad hoc, immature processes to disciplined, mature processes with improved quality and effectiveness” . [CMMI-DEV v1.3 Glossary]  It is a collection of best practices that organizations could adopt in order to establish disciplined and homogenous processes applied in the projects.

Kanban is “the evolutionary change method that utilizes a kanban (small k) pull system, visualization, and other tools to catalize the introduction of Lean ideas into technology development and IT operations” . [D. J Anderson, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business]

So how do they fit together?

Yuval Yeret, in “Mashing up Kanban & CMMI – A potential love story?” matches the Kanban practices to the CMMI maturity levels.

I believe that CMMI-companies would be interested in some more details; therefore I try to go a bit deeper in this topic.

CMMI organizations take the following advantage of Kanban:

• CMMI lacks a process area about managing organizational changes. However, the capability to drive the change smoothly towards the organizational objectives is a key for the success of the initiative. Kanban facilitates the change programs making the solutions evolve and be adopted without radical changes in processes, job titles and responsibilities that provoke resistance. David J Anderson has a good post on Developing change management capability in the CMMI context.
• The purpose of the Organizational Process Focus process area is to perform the process improvement activities based on thorough understanding of the strengths and weaknesses in the current processes. To my understanding the primary objective of an organization is not simply to have effective processes, rather to have them integrated in an efficient workflow which allows the organization to meet customers’ needs, be competitive and profitable. In this sense, applying Kanban to orient the process improvement activities towards better workflow performance will amplify the results and the benefits from the initiative.
• Project management processes are probably the ones that take most advantage from using Kanban.  All the practices related to monitoring project progress, stakeholder involvement, project issues, collaboration and coordination issues are visualised on the Kanban board. This facilitates significantly (even eliminates the need to look for data for) the report preparation and the issue resolution. In addition, ‘Manage flow’ elegantly focusses the attention and the effort of the whole team, not only the project manager, on delivering on time and with good quality.As a consequence, the project pace accelerates, project delays and cost overruns go down, and the effort dedicated to project management decreases.The usage of real data of lead time and delivery rate facilitates a lot the estimations and the predictability.Is not this a good reason to start with Kanban?
• Process and product quality assurance: The Kanban practice ‘Make process policies explicit’ directly supports a sound implementation of this process area.
• For High Maturity organizations, the process performance baselines are easily established and continuously used for project management. In fact organizations at ML2&3 also take advantage of knowing quantitatively the workflow performance.
• Causal analysis and resolution practices are applied at any level, not only at ML5.

Kanban organizations take advantage of CMMI in the following ways:

• Kanban provides a means for identification of problems in certain processes in the workflow, but it does not provide solutions for all of them. The best practices from CMMI will guide process refinement and formalization.
• The Organizational Process Performancepractices, especially if implemented following the Six Sigma approach, will lead to better understanding of process variation, studying both the special and the common causes for it, and identifying the vital few influencing factors. Understanding process variation as well as stabilizing process performance is important for achieving predictability.In addition, developing process performance models would enable making dynamic decisions related to project objectives.
• CMMI extends the scope of improvements at organizational level with the processes areas of Organizational Process Definition, Organizational Training, Measurement and Analysis, Configuration management, Decision Analysis and Resolution, Organizational Performance Management.
• For organizations that need a formal recognition of their maturity based on a CMMI model, a SCAMPI A appraisal is the corresponding way to obtain it.
  Related to this, you could see Hillel Glaser post Short-Cut to CMMI: Lean First

In summary,

• If you are CMMI company, you can start using Kanban, if you are interested in speeding up your projects and/or services, reducing project delays and cost overruns and focussing the development/ operation activities on what your customers value.
• If you already apply the Lean-Kanban principles and practices and need to formalise and refine your processes with effective practices, as well as obtain an official certification, CMMI is the right model for you together with SCAMPI, the standard appraisal method for it.

Have a look back to the near past.

How many times did you restructure your organization or redefine your roles and responsibilities?

Why did you do it?

To adapt to the new business environment, isn’t it? To become more agile. To reduce bureaucracy and costs. To be able to respond more quickly to customer needs. To …

Nowadays, companies, both more and less agile, are looking for effective means to manage changing priorities, increase productivity, improve visibility in ongoing work, improve team morale, get faster time-to-market, become more lean.

However, a study by Towers Watson shows that only 25% of change management initiatives are successful over the long term.

According to the 8th Version One Report about the State of Agile,  53% of the companies suffer from inability to change the organizational culture, 42%  admit they experience resistance to change, 35% say that the barrier for them is the attempt to fit agile elements into non-agile framework.

In XXI century revolutions lead to resistance rather than improvements

Organizational change has always been hard. However, adopting a drastically different approach to work nowadays is bound to meet a resistance, active and passive, and fail.

Kanban is a method for managing organizational changes. It helps organizations improve gradually by means of focus on flow and delivering customer value. The first two Kanban principles are:

Start from what you are doing now
and
Pursue incremental and evolutionary changes.

Changes occur when the majority of the people in an organization want them happen.

“Kanban is like water”. [D. J. Anderson; adapted from Bruce Lee’s “Be like water”] It does not prescribe particular practices or roles, because implied routines create resistance. Instead, it enables the development of the most adequate solutions through transparency and shared visibility of where problems, waste, and bottlenecks appear in the workflow.

If you cannot see it, you can hardly control it

The greatest concerns about the adopting agile are the Lack of up-front planning (30%), Loss of management control (30%), and Management opposition (28%) .

Managing a variety of projects and services bases on abstract numeric information requires extraordinary mental skills and deep context understanding.  When correct decisions have to be taken quickly, there is not a better ally for the brain than a visual Kanban board that shows you at a glance the state and the urgency of each undertaken work, the resources occupation, and the blockages in the workflow. In addition, the same information is available in real time for management, team and other stakeholders that can contribute to defining the right approach.

Transparency and visibility are essential to Kanban. They are crucial for quickly spotting workflow problems and redundant work, as well as for achieving positive effects like shared vision of the work, collaboration, self-organization, and result-orientation.

Moreover, combining visual control and transparency with the fifth Kanban core practice Implement feedback loops, helps organizations take advantage from their own experience, become learning organizations.

Feel the power of your real data

Your customer needs a quick estimate to make a Go/No Go decision for an order; a project has to estimate budget and time to get a Carte Blanche for development.

Estimation takes time, and is (always) wrong.

Kanban suggests taking advantage of your real data. More precisely, know the delivery time (lead time) distribution of your types of work and classes of services, as well as the capacity of your team. Then use them in a combination with the particular context for a reliable planning and sustainable business.

The cumulative flow diagram is an essential real-time management tool for any team, warning of potential delays, accumulation of unfinished work, and unsteady flow.

Kanban metrics are pragmatic, focused on the fitness of the work for its purpose :

• From customer perspective: on time delivery, predictability, service quality
• From organizational perspective: meeting due dates, resource utilization, performance
• From business perspective: efficiency, sustainability, adaptability

Balance demand and capacity

Limiting the work in progress in a kanban system ensures that the undertaken work does not exceed team capacity, avoiding in this way people over-burdening and unbalanced workload.

On the other side, defining classes of service delineates the type of demand, the priorities and the rules for treating each type in accord with the business objectives.

Putting it all together facilitates serving the different types of demand  with the available team capacity.

Stop starting, start finishing!

“Multitaskers experience 40% drop of productivity, and make up to 50% more errors” .

Kanban Core Practice Limit Work in Progress (WIP) directly addresses the multitasking problem. Limiting WIP for the entire kanban system ensures a smooth flow, improves the overall performance and the product or service quality.

The focus on the Minimal Marketable Feature (MMF) makes breaking down the work into smaller components. Successfully finishing features that add value to the customer, increases customer satisfaction, and brings valuable feedback to the ongoing work, which helps completing it well on time.

Kanban is your means to Lean

The need of new working and management methods is well recognised by technology organizations. Therefore, we read and speak about Modern Management Methods, 2nd Generation Agile, Lean-Scrum, Lean Product Development, etc.

Kanban is a Lean approach to improving work.  The Kanban system is a pull system that visualises the value stream, the work in progress, the work types and the risks.

The Kanban core practices Limit Work in Progress, Manage Flow and Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally  are about maintaining continuous flow that delivers value to the customer and its continuous improvement.

Is Kanban appropriate for my organization?

Speaking about methods, we, consultants, usually give answers like “It depends. If your organization is of type A, your projects of type B and C, your  client expects  D, then the appropriate methods for your context are M and N“.

With respect to Kanban, the answer is a lot simpler: if you want to gain the benefits of Kanban, start applying it. It works well in both small and large teams, CMMI and agile companies, development projects and operations.

To wrap up, leading an organization to a better state requires proper management of the organizational change, developing the capability to successfully manage changing demand, keeping a sustainable pace of work, learning from experience and evolving gradually.

Kanban addresses all these aspects and and works well in any context provided that evolutionary improvements are sought.