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.

Concepts are powerful symbols of meaning in communications. They allow us to organize our knowledge and understanding within a context, and provide a framework to structure the objects and their interactions over time. Concepts can thus help us to integrate apparently unrelated observations and phenomena into viable hypothesis and theories about the world. Readers can then use these concepts to communicate and validate current aspects about a system, and assess the potential value of changes which are under consideration.

A Concept of Operations (ConOps) is a documentation approach used to summarize the value proposition of development projects. It is frequently used within aerospace and defense applications, but is equally applicable to enterprise IT projects as well. A graphical concept map often is used to communicate similar information. However, the graphical depictions often must be narrated or walked through with supplemental descriptions in order for the underlying concepts to be consistently understood by different people or over different timeframes. Use case diagrams suffer similar ambiguity.   read more »

When performance issues arise with teams, the underlying belief is often that these issues have resulted from a lack of adequate direction. In response, businesses often add extra layers of oversight and encouragement to reinforce this direction to the workforce, and clarify what is expected. Too often, and especially when done in haste, these additional levels of review and pressure are implemented while there are still overlapping and fuzzy allocations of responsibility. This often results in inconsistent and poorly communicated direction, which can confuse the people who have to actually make progress towards achieving the goal, and erode their efficiency. Unfortunately, since they are the ones already behind schedule, this may hurt, rather than help, their efforts to move in the right direction more quickly and more effectively.  read more »

We live in a world of increasing complexity, where even the best of the best can struggle to accomplish all that is expected of them. This book describes one of the most basic, yet underutilized, techniques that is available to help in such situations: the checklist.

Checklists are used as a standardized basis to guide decision-making and validate that a set of criteria have been satisfied. First introduced decades ago, after the crash of the Boeing 299 on its second flight test, checklists have had a remarkable (and largely unheralded) track record. They have been associated with dramatic improvements to operational safety in aviation, reduced fatalities in medicine, improved performance of venture capitalists in selecting investment portfolio elements, and enhanced communications in skyscraper construction.  read more »

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right author: Atul Gawande rating: ASIN or ISBN-10: 0805091742 binding: Hardcover list price: $24.50 USD amazon price: $36.60 USD

There is an understandable desire from project leadership, sponsors, and customers for predictable performance in our projects. Such determinism enables other business actions and decisions to be reliably coordinated based upon these outcomes.

Most of us are invested in the faith that such predictability will be achieved by following plans we create for these endeavors. But in the real world, achieving such outcomes is nearly always more complex than we originally anticipate when we craft these plans.

In the new book, A Checklist Manifesto, the author Atul Gawande describes how difficult navigating this complexity can be:

Two professors who study the science of  complexity—Brenda Zimmerman of York University and  Sholom Glouberman of the University of Toronto—have proposed a distinction among three different kinds of problems in the world: the simple, the complicated, and the complex. Simple problems, they note, are ones like baking a cake from a mix. There is a recipe. Sometimes there are a few basic techniques to learn. But once these are mastered, following the recipe brings a high likelihood of success.

Planning and estimation strive to anticipate and shape future events from an imperfect understanding of the current situation, the desired outcomes, relevant historical information, and the actions required to achieve success. Planning and estimating must discover, focus on, and document assumptions about key unknowns, develop hypotheses about current and future constraints and their likely impact on the course of the project, and translate these assessments into action plans and affordable resource allocations.

These plans must launch the project with focused momentum directed towards the project's vision and objectives, with monitors to build speed appropriately, proactively manage non-conformant work as it arises, and preserve options to tune the velocity vectors of selected tasks throughout the project's time horizon. Such self-correcting project controls are essential to navigate to the project's target successfully, across unknown territory, while carrying as big a payload as possible.

Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for constraints to exist on how much fuel can be carried on such missions. Such constraints arise at multiple levels, and form part of the negotiations stakeholders play.

I have been involved in countless efforts throughout my career when various organizations needed to change their direction fundamentally. Such changes are rarely quick, easy, or successful the first time. The reason for this is because understanding the details of such change is itself an incremental discovery process, because the underlying organizations have one or more cultures that may resist these changes to varying degrees, because the interorganizational dynamics are often not sufficiently understood, and because communicating the nature of and approach for such changes to those who need to implement the changes is difficult.  read more »

There is a classic depiction of the interrelationships between cost, quality, and delivery ("pick two") which suggests that each can be easily traded for the other. Yet often, this mindset only examines such trades at a particular point in time, and may ignore the longer-term ramifications of decisions available when the tradeoffs are performed. The mental models of those in decision-making roles are often clouded by underlying assumptions and biases, such as believing that synergy will produce an on-demand value stream, that estimates are reliable, that intuitive decision-making can substitute for disciplined elaboration of details, and that innovations can be scheduled when needed. Unfortunately, the impacts of poor decision-making can often be traced directly to significant downstream costs - usually after opportunities to avoid those costs are sunk by prior strategies and tactics.  read more »

Most change management and systematic improvement efforts acknowledge that new solutions must be comprehensive, yet affordable. To be sustainable, they must deliver practices that are implemented through a common set of integrated plans and processes, and support those practices by proven procedures, templates, tools, and training which are appropriate to the situation. Unfortunately, investing in such infrastructure usually only realizes payoffs in the long-term (as opportunities to apply these new approaches are identified). As a result, such investments often are subject to short-sighted budget-cutting.