CMM(I)^® Experience
An In-House Experiential Learning Workshop for
Introduction to SPI and CMM-SW or CMMI
1 Day + Evening

Do you want to create a strong awareness and motivation for process improvement for your employees?
Do you want to establish an unforgettable experience about the essence CMM(I) Maturity Level-2?
Are you tired of lengthy, boring slide presentations in a classroom teaching setup?

Implementing CMM or CMMI is not only about developing and rolling out some new procedures and templates. Instead, it's all about continuous organizational change; transforming an old culture into new, expected, disciplined and effective behavior. Process improvement programmes normally fail whenever the cultural aspects of organizational change are insufficiently addressed.

Whenever an improvement programme is carried with strong support from senior management, many people in the organization will go through an often painful and lengthy process of letting go of old behavior and becoming motivated to adopt a new behavior.

This unique one-day workshop is an inspiring learning experience and it creates awareness and motivation for process improvement and CMM(I) for all its participants!
  

  Objectives of the CMM(I) Experience Workshop (1 day + evening version)

• To establish awareness and motivation for SPI and CMM
• To provide an overview of the CMM(I), maturity levels and the (K)PAs of maturity levels 2 and 3
• To provide some skills training for typical organizational improvement roles like QA-people, (S)EPG-members, middle managers, project leaders
• To let the participants experience how they can change a chaotic organization into a disciplined organization that delivers quality products and services
• To let the participants experience the need for:
  • alignment of vision and objectives between customer, internal departments and subcontractors
  • communication and co-operation
  • clear responsibilities and resources
  • training and coaching
  • process discipline
  • communicated and agreed upon requirements
  • estimating, planning and explicit commitment processes
  • measurement, progress monitoring and controlling of development teams and subcontractors
  • quality control (verification and validation) and quality assurance
  • configuration management: traceability of requirements, release control
• To let the participants experience critical organizational and personal success and failure factors for improving business performance
• To let the participants become aware of their individual contribution to the organization's success
• To establish some team-building and to have a lot of fun

The focus of the workshop is on letting the participants experience some essential principles of CMM(I) and process improvement and not so much on discussing all the details of the CMM(I). For the latter purpose we offer several other CMM(I) and (K)PA courses and workshops.

About Experiential Learning

Experiential learning is the most effective adult learning method for changing behaviors and cultures.
Instead of participants playing a passive role listening to lengthy slide presentations and taking notes, they actively engage in a series of exercises and simulations. They will actually experience the lessons to be learned, which are always related to:

• Transforming the perception and attitude of people in an organization towards past, existing and future situations
• Transforming approaches to problem solving
• Establishing cultural change at the personal, team, project and organizational level

With Experiential Learning as the main workshop method, the learning experiences will have been carved into the participants memory until years later. This experiential anchor provides a good foundation for implementing cultural and organizational transformation. It is that transformation which enables us to produce more satisfying results both in organizational and personal life.

Some Advantages of the Experiential Learning approach:

• Participants can easily connect the issues to their own real organizational situation
• Participants are stimulated to actively apply their individual expertise
• It offers a safe environment for experimenting with old and new behaviors
• The participants receive early feedback on the consequences of their own and the group behavior
• Issues that normally have a long lead-time become clear within a few hours as a result of the phased simulations and exercises
• It is very cost effective in establishing a shared vision and motivation for change for large groups of people
• It can well be combined with more traditional teaching approaches
  

Target Participant Groups
 
The CMM(I) Experience workshop is intended for groups of participants of a (software/systems) engineering organization who are or will be involved in an organizational improvement programme, where CMM or CMMI serves as the selected process model. It can equally well be applied for awareness and for refresher training purposes.

Typically the participant group could be an entire department, a project team, a product team, an improvement team, an (S)EPG, a management team or a cross-section of multiple departments. You can also choose to go through the experience together with your (internal) customers and suppliers.

It is beneficial when the participants for the workshop also have to co-operate together in daily life.
For optimal results, the minimum number of participants is 10 and the maximum is 20.
     

Workshop Description and Programme

The students will experience that it is possible to change an initially chaotic organization into a more mature organization. They will experience that it is indeed possible to deliver quality products and services to their customers and to successfully implement CMM(I)-based improvements at the same time. They will experience that improving processes can be done in a lean-and-mean fashion, in line with the business and without introducing a bureaucracy.

During the workshop the participants will develop and deliver a complex technical product (airplane, car, truck, or other) in a multidisciplinary development setting with a customer, suppliers, a senior manager, department leaders, a product manager, a project manager, development teams, quality control team and quality assurance team.

There will be three development-and-delivery rounds. In each round the participants are challenged to cope with new organizational problems and lessons to be learned about stakeholder expectation management, communication, co-operation, too optimistic forecasting, estimating and planning, unreliable suppliers, departments with hidden agenda's,  budget cuts, reorganization, etc...

After each development round there will be an evaluation of actual against planned performance, some root cause analysis of differences and a personal reflection for each participant on their contribution to the results. The evaluation results are discussed in a plenary feedback session.

After the evaluation, the teams get a chance to define and improve processes and to implement improvements in the next development and delivery cycle.

The experiential phases are interchanged with three lectures and two extra experiential exercises:

• Lecture on CMM(I) principles and maturity levels
• Lecture on CMM(I) Maturity level-2 essentials
• Exercise on integrated teaming
• Critical success factors for process improvement
• Exercise on personal motivation and personal contribution for results

Morning Programme:

• Welcome and introduction
• Execute first development and delivery cycle
• Evaluation of lessons learned
• Lecture & discussion on CMM(I) principles and maturity Levels
• Plan the second development and delivery cycle

Lunch: 12.00 - 13.00

Afternoon Programme: 13.00 - 17.00

• Execute second development and delivery cycle
• Evaluation of lessons learned
• Lecture and discussion on CMM(I) level-2
• Exercise on integrated teaming
• Plan the third development and delivery cycle

Dinner: 17.00 - 18.00

Evening Programme: 18.00 - 21.00 hrs

• Execute third development and delivery cycle
• Evaluation of lessons learned
• Lecture and discussion on process improvement pitfalls
• Exercise on personal motivation and personal contribution for results
• Workshop evaluation and adjourn
    

Instructors

The workshop is moderated by two senior trainers from SPI Partners. They have 10+ years of experience implementing CMM(I) in organizations. They have trained many hundreds of people in CMM(I), organizational and personal change and they have carried out various CMM(I) assessments. One trainer is a candidate SEI Authorized CBA-IPI Lead Assessor and the other has an MBA in Management of Change.
  

Language

In Holland the workshop will be presented in Dutch, in all other countries in English.
  

Course Materials

After the course, the participants will receive a binder with with copies of the presentations. Furthermore one CD with essential CMM and CMM(I) documentation and some freeware browser and self-assessment tools are provided to the organization.
  

Location

It is highly recommended to have this training off-site, so that participants can make their contribution without distractions from their daily work. The location should have two rooms that both are large enough to have the entire group (10 to 20 people). One room should have LCD-projector  facilities. Both rooms should have flip-charts. Catering services should be on the location (coffee, lunch, dinner).
  

Tailoring

The workshop can be tailored to the specific needs of the organization. For example:

• A 4-hour management awareness training exists both with and without experiential learning aspects
• An 8-hour version is available as well, which pays less attention to personal motivation and contribution aspects
• The workshop can be extended to a full-blown CMM or CMMI-course (2 to 4 days) by adding modules from our other CMM or CMMI courses.
    

More information

For more information, please contact us:

Simon Porro, SPI Partners, Sprookjesbosch 53, 5629 JB Eindhoven, The Netherlands Tel: +31 40 248 98 22, Fax (Courses): +31 40 266 86 66 Fax (Personal): +31 40 248 42 34 Email: info@spipartners.nl  Web: http://www.spipartners.nl.

^® CMM and CMMI are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University.
^SM CMM Integration, SCAMPI, SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, IDEAL, Interim Profile, SEI, SEPG, PSP, TSP are service marks of Carnegie Mellon University.