Organizations often pursue competency-based management techniques in efforts to understand and secure a competitive advantage within the markets which they serve. The competency assessments which are initiated by such organizations will only be useful if the definition and effective application of the underlying elements of these competencies (i.e., its ontology) are sufficiently robust.

A guiding principle for such organizations is suggested by the Software Engineering Institute's value proposition for the CMMI:

The quality of a product is largely determined by the capability of the process which is designed to produce it, and the maturity of the organization in implementing that process.

A timeline is a retrospective representation of a linear sequence of significant events which have occurred during the accomplishment of some activity. A timetable provides a corresponding, forward-looking series for pre-arranged events, and is often organized as a tabular list. Such timetables are used to plan and track such activities for performing and reporting on future work. Each of the events associated with these timelines and timetables may be comprised of either top-level milestones or more detailed inchstones. Read more »

The word process is an abstract concept. As a result, its meaning is often dependent upon the context in which it is used, and the mental models of those who are using the term. The dangerous part of this is that people can carry on conversations about them, and believe that they are talking about the same situations, even though they are actually discussing several, fundamentally different things. As a result, they each can think that they are communicating about the same 'process', and can go away from that conversation with the mistaken impression that they all agree on something meaningful, or all have a shared vision of what it will take to transform something. What is really going on is that consensus is typically achieved by adding ambiguity, rather than removing it.

As an example of these different 'mindsets', consider the following: Read more »

The scientific method is the basis of our modern world. The three steps of the method are to establish a hypothesis, perform an experiment, and evaluate the results. The method does not guarantee a successful outcome on the first try, but has the advantage of self-correction. As a result, over time, it will (through repeated application and follow-on action) converge on a solution, if a solution can be found.

However, if core disciplines are not used throughout this experimentation (for example, by not keeping good records, or controlling the variables of your experiments), this ultimate success is not assured. Additionally, if experimental evidence is not peer reviewed, history has shown that the results claimed may not be reliable! Read more »

Most improvement efforts have an element of divide and rule to them; our hope is that by carving up the territory, we can conquer it. But any top-level representation of a complex system is, by it's nature, just an abstraction. As such, it will highlight some aspects of the system, and suppresses visibility of others. We do this in order to communicate about certain behaviors or features of the system, usually by telling stories about those parts (though we often don't write those stories down). There can thus be many different top-level views of any system. It is possible for them all to be concurrently valid, useful, and consistent with one another, but this doesn't just happen automatically; it must be designed to be so. Read more »