This CR describes how to deploy the P-CMM to support migration to Agile, and to support Agile teams in organizations. Since the P-CMM was developed independent from Agile, and before Agile methodologies became available, interpretation is needed on how to deploy P-CMM in an Agile context. To support using the P-CMM, this CR gives a roadmap of P-CMM process areas that an organization can implement as a start, to (using Agile principles) reap quick business benefits.
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 P-CMM can be used additional to the Agile methods to support their implementation. Implementing agile needs different disciplines and roles than mentioned in most Agile methods (like HR and middle management), which are within the scope and purpose of the P-CMM. Since the success of Agile depends on having competent and skilled professionals, addressing people issues that are relevant for Agile increases the acceptance and effective deployment of Agile in organizations.
Specific additions to the P-CMM Process Areas:
Staffing
- Agile puts strong requirements on the so called “soft skills” like communication, collaboration and feedback; the P-CMM should emphasize these skills when recruiting new professionals.
- To create and maintain high performing teams, it is important that teams are kept stable where possible and that changes to the teams are carefully managed, involving the team members as much as possible.
- For larger agile organizations working with multiple teams it may be needed to deploy specific methods for team composition, like Belbin.
- One of the agile principles is the 40 hour workweek. An organization should have insight in the needed capacity to assure that professionals working in the teams will be able to do their work within a 40 hour workweek.
Participatory Culture
- It should be clear which decisions Agile teams are allowed and expected to take, and how these decision are related to higher level decisions in the organization.
- There are several Agile methodologies that describe how decisions should be taken (like Scrum, Crystal and DSDM), they assure that the professionals are sufficiently involved in the decisions, and as a result can assure that they deliver what is decided.
- Agile coaches can assist teams and managers in implementing the Agile decision structure, and assure that the process will support the organization in meeting their business goals, and the teams in delivering value.
Communication and Coordination
- Agile teams have a need for information regarding the organizational mission, strategies and main results that are required. This is a significant difference with “traditional” organization, where line and project managers are responsible for these kinds of decisions, based upon information that they received about organizational goals and work policies and processes. To empower teams it is essential that they received sufficient and timely information.
- Agile teams must be supported to develop their communication and coordination skills, Agile expect them to be able to collaborate with their stakeholders and take decisions.
- Agile teams can raise impediments that hinder them in doing their work. These impediments must be taken up by the organization and need to be solved with sufficient priority to assure that teams can meet their commitments.
Compensation
- The biggest difference of Agile compared tot traditional organizations is that it are the teams that deliver value for their customers, and they deliver this value continuously in iterations. Rewarding systems need to support and stimulate team behaviour. This implies that the organisation as a whole must recognize the value delivered by teams, and adjust the compensation criteria to reward this.
- Since most compensation strategies are based on functions, responsibility and authority and hierarchy, implementing Agile usually has great impact. Changes to the compensation strategy need to be developed, discussed and agreed upon and communicated within the organization, maybe a separate rewarding system for Agile should be considered.
- Given the frequent delivery of Agile, there may be a need to introduce compensation systems that reward the delivered value quickly. This could be a bonus system, variably salary depending on timely delivery of quality software that helps the users to become more successful.
- Finally, non salary based rewarding mechanism should be considered, defined and deployed such as public recognition of results, awards, team building activities, memberships of professional communities and of course managers who simply compliment teams on the results that they reached .
In my opinion, many organization struggle to adopt their compensation system to support agile, which can hamper team building significantly and make the implementation of Agile less effective. This makes compensation a very important process area to implement agile.
Work Environment
- Professionals in Agile teams must be able to communicate and collaborate, therefore they need a working space where they can share and improve their ideas on how to solve the problems at hand.
- In many larger organizations, Agile teams are spread across locations, countries and sometimes even time zones, or they need to collaborate and communicate with teams at different locations. This requires specific communications tools, like high speed internet connections, working spaces for both “loud work” and “silent work” and sometimes even state of the art tools like video walls and virtual working environments. An organization has to assure that these tools and needs are fulfilled, enabling teams to perform and deliver.
- Organization needs to understand how Agile teams work in practice, and why, to assure that practices like planning games, stand-up meetings and pair programming are accepted and supported by managers and supporting functions.
- Given the high speed with which Agile teams execute their iterations and change direction where required, organizations must assure that they can deliver and support the work environment in a timely matter. Delivery times in Agile organizations need to be significantly shorter to ensure that the Agile teams meet their iterative delivery dates.
Competency Development
- Working in teams requires more generalists, professionals that are able to perform different activities (like design, coding and testing), so that the activities can be taken up by more than 1 team member.
- Mechanisms like coaching and pair programming can be used by professionals to develop new skills on the job, but often also training is needed to assure that professionals have the required competencies.
- Feedback is essential to learn, teams deploy demo sessions to get feedback on the developed product, and use retrospectives to look back on their ways of working in order to continuously learn and improve, both individually and as a team.
- To enable learning across teams and projects, mechanisms need to be established to exchange experiences and best (and worst!) practices, like communities of practices, knowledge management systems, recognized experts, etc.
Please mention your name below if you support this and/or contributed to the Change Request for adding Agile in the People-CMM.
Name – website/email address
Ben Linders – www.benlinders.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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