CMMI Development Case Study

Case of a Mission Critical System

Story of a large size (50+) software maintenance and production support project. It was a mission critical system having 2/3 Releases per week and highly volatile requirements. Average cycle time for the system changes was 2 days.

Customer faced post-delivery issues after almost every release and this delayed the new release by more than a month. Due to the defects observed, the project always missed important deadlines wrt statutory requirements.

Customer reported the issue to the CEO of the vendor company and Customer suggested implementing CMMI practices.

Solution to the issue: CMMI Implementation

As a result of CMMI initiative took place in the entire organisation. A full time software quality analyst was appointed on the project.

Following were the tasks performed by the quality person:

1.    The defects reported by the customer reported were analysed to understand the root causes of the problems. It was observed that most of the problems are due to lack of proper communication, lack of clarity about the requirements, and lack of review processes

2.    Performing initial process analysis, it was observed that there were few problems in the process as below:

·         No estimates for the changes to be done

·         No root cause analysis to understand the problems

·         No plans were prepared to schedule the release delivery

·         Effort spent by the team member was not reported

·         No clarification from the customer on the requirements.

·         There was no evidence process documentation

·         No review of requirements, design, test plan, source code, and release plans.

·         No confirmation about user acceptance

3.    The issues in the process were discussed with the project manager and quality head, subsequently it was decided that audits shall be performed for every release.

4.    Estimation model based on complexity of the change requirements was prepared.

5.    Release schedule was established and team was asked to update the effort spent on each task mentioning activity wise effort spent.

6.    A Release Process template was prepared which included:

·         Change Request Description

·         Changes to UI Design

·         Changes to Database Design

·         Test Cases

·         Release Note

·         Live Migration Plan

7.    Customer was informed that due to new process introduced the cycle time would increase from 2 days to two weeks. As customer was concerned about defect free delivery, he agreed to accept delivery every couple of weeks.

8.    The checklist was prepared which included items such as

·         Change Request Note (CR)

·         Requirements Analysis,

·         Review of Requirements analysis by project lead

·         Customer approval on Requirements analysis

·         Changes to user interface and database design  

·         Peer review of design

·         Peer review of source Code

·         Test cases

·         Peer review of test cases

·         Review of test cases by customer

·         Closure of defects reported during reviews and testing,

·         Confirmation about User Acceptance Test

·         Review of release plan

9.    Independent quality auditor was given authority to stop the release delivery if there was non-compliance.

10.  After every release the release audit was conducted and problems were resolved before the final delivery.

Over a period of six months, the post-delivery defects have been significantly reduced and customer results were highly satisfactory.

At an Organisation level, CMMI initiative was happening where other projects learned from the experience and cross-pollination between the projects started happening.

Lot of other initiatives which took place with the support from organisational level process functions as below. The initiative was to standardise the project practices and roll out them to the larger audience. Following practices were implemented:

·         OSSP Orientation

·         Project Defined Process

·         Configuration Management and Audits

·         Risk Management

·         Decision Analysis and Resolution

Project processes started improving further when organisation moved from CMMI Level 3 to 4 and then to 5 subsequently in three years. Following practices were implemented.

·         Quantitative Project Management

·         Causal Analysis and Resolution

·         Process and Technology Innovation

Over the period of 3 years, the project processes became capable of delivering high maturity performance.

This is how the critical problem faced by a project became an opportunity for the organisation to improve its process and make use of the same to attain high maturity status amongst the early CMMI adopters. This proved to be competitive advantage for the organisation which was now even more ready to take quantum leap towards achieving business excellence.

Six Sigma

Why Six Sigma:

Let us analyse one or more challenges that your business may be facing:

1. You have established process framework having one or the other process models or standards. You do not know how to take the quality journey forward.
2. You are not able to see any value of the business processes which have been implemented.
3. You think that there is some improvement needed in your business processes.
4. You are still confused about whether is it possible to see any measurable results over how the business processes are performing.
5. You do not know how you can manage the business risks by improving the business processes.
6. You are not having any road map to tell you what to do when there happens to be significant deviation from the business objectives.
7. You are not sure whether do you want to go for any kind of process implementation.

For one or more of these concerns which matter, there is one solution and that is to implement “Six Sigma”.

Six Sigma Benefit

Six Sigma’s DMAIC framework helps you to tie business results to you your business processes. No matter whether you have any processes as such. It can tell you what business processes that need to be focused upon to improve business results:

• Customer Satisfaction
• Productivity
• Profitability
• Quality
• Employee Satisfaction
• Market Share
• and many more.

DMAIC

Define:

Define phase, you are making a project selection. Primarily to identify what is the business goal you want to achieve.

Measure:

Measure phase enable to work on creating a measurement system which  gives you inputs about how is current performance of the business processes.

Analyse:

Analyse phase, you are trying to understand the causes of variation between business results and business goal. Which are the independent outcomes of business processes which contribute into variation in final outcomes of the business means the business results.

Improve:

Now that you know what business processes are impacting the business results, you want to improve those selected business processes. In Improve phase, you are trying to propose and pilot the proposed solution to establish improved performance capability.

Control:

In Control phase, you want to implement the tested solution and see that there is actual improvement in the business results as measured wrt to the business goals. If the business processes still observe there is deviation from the expected results, you want to create a control plan which can be initiated in such scenarios.

Transitioning from ISO 9001:2008 to ISO 9001:2015

What are the 7 QM principles?

1. Customer focus:To remain in the business, customer is the important driving factor of the business. It is necessary to focus on the meeting or exceeding the customer needs to ensure long term sustainability of the business.
2. Leadership:It is important to decide if the right things are being done to achieve business goals in-line with vision or mission of the organisation.
3.  Engagement of people:To deliver value, it is necessary to stay focused on building competence and engaging people.
4. Process approach:It is required to understand how the processes work together as a business function so that prediction and consistency of achieving business results can be ensured.
5. Improvement:It is important to understand how the changes in internal and external business environment. The management system should be able to adapt to changes happening in order to continue to deliver value in the changed environment.
6. Evidence-based decision making:It is important to understand and analyse decisions based on the facts than gut feeling to produce desired business results.
7. Relationship management:It is important that how the business establishes plans to manage effective relations with other stakeholders such as suppliers

Why QMS?

Implementing a quality management system will help you:

• Evaluate needs of the organisation
• To identify who is affected
• What are their expectations?
• To state goals and
• To identify new opportunities.
• To ensure that organisation consistently delivers results in order to fulfill or exceed customer expectations. This will help in repeat business, new business and overall reputation of the organisation.
• Process help in developing understanding among the people that leads to increased productivity and profitability.
• Meet the all requirements including functional and regulatory requirements.
• Customers want to assess delivery capability of the organisation before it gives the business.
• Ensure risk management is performed to achieve business objectives.

What is difference between ISO 9001: 2008 and 9001:2015

• New structure to support integration with other management systems
• Higher weight-age to Risk based thinking

ISO 9001:2015 Benefits

• Leadership Engagement
• Risk Management
• Uses simplified language
• Common structure to accommodate multiple management systems
• Supply chain management focus
• User-friendly for services and knowledge-based organizations
• Customers want to assess delivery capability of the organisation before it gives the business.
• Ensure risk management is performed to achieve business objectives.

What can be done :

• Get acquainted to new expectations
• Conduct gap analysis wrt new requirements
• Develop an plan for implementation of new requirements
• Make all parties aware about the key changes to be realised which have impact on effectiveness of organisation.
• Update QMS to meet the revised requirements.
• Get certified as per new requirements

Key Changes:

• Emphasis on Risk-based management
• Preventive action
• Increase emphasis on achieving value for organization and its customers
• Documented Information
• Decreased emphasis on documentation
• Expands concept of documentation
• Replaces Documents and Records
• Organizational Context – Responsiveness to business environment
• Outsourcing is now External Provision
• Enhanced leadership requirements
• No requirement for Management Representative
• No requirement for Quality Manual

What are the changes in terminology:

• Product is now goods or services
• Process approach is now stated requirement
• Risk is defined as effect of uncertainty (ISO 31000)
• Design and Development is now Development
• Monitoring and Measurement are now separate
• Monitoring : Status of system, process or activity
• Measurement : a process to determine value
• Context of organisation

Timelines for upgradation to ISO 9001:2015 from ISO 9001:2008 :

You have a three-year transition period from the date of publication (September 2015) to move to the 2015 version. This means that, after the end of September 2018, a certificate to ISO 9001:2008 will no longer be valid.

Structure of ISO 9001:2015

O-3 Remain same structure 4.      Context of the Organization ·         Understanding the Organization and its context External and internal issues relevant to its purpose and that affect its ability to achieve the intended outcomes of the QMS. ·         Needs and expectations QMS to determine expectations of interested parties: o   Direct customers o   End users o   Suppliers, distributors, retailers o   Regulators or o   any other relevant parties ·         Scope ·         Management system Establish, implement, maintain and improve QMS including the processes needed and their interactions in accordance with standard. This was not there. Earlier clause 4 was Quality Management System 5.      Leadership ·         Management commitment ·         Policy ·         Roles, Responsibility and Authority Top management demonstrates leadership and commitment wrt QMS ·         Ensuring QMS integration into business processes ·         Promoting awareness of process approach ·         Supporting other relevant management roles to demonstrate their leadership as it applies to their areas of responsibility Clause 5 in 9001:2008 was Management Responsibility. It is changed to Leadership. 6.      Planning ·         Actions to address risks and opportunities ·         Objectives and plans to achieve them o   Assure the QMS can achieve its intended outcomes. o   Prevent or reduce undesired effects o   Achieve improvement Organisation to plan ·         actions to address these risks and opportunities ·         to integrate and implement actions into QMS  and ·         evaluate the effectiveness of these actions This is new clause coming from planning phase of Product Realization. In 9001:2008 Clause 6 was Resource Management which has now moved into Clause 7 Support. 7.      Support ·         Resources Determine and provide resources to establish, implement, maintain and improve the QMS. Resources may be infrastructure, process environment, monitoring and knowledge. Ensure the following for the same. ·         Competence ·         Awareness ·         Communications ·         Documented Information This is new clause coming from 6 of Resource Management as per 9001:2008 Clause 7 was Product Realisation moved clause 8 Operations. 8.      Operations ·         Operational planning and control Establish criteria of these processes Implement the control of the processes as per the criteria Keep sufficient documented information to demonstrate processes have been carried out as planned. Organisation to control planned and review consequences of untended changes, taking actions to mitigate any adverse effects as necessary. Ensure operation of function or process of organisation by external provider is controlled. Control of external provision of goods and services to satisfy the specified requirements This is new clause coming from 7 of Product Realisation. Clause 8 Measurement, Analyse and Improvement has been split into two as ·         Performance Evaluation ·         Improvement  9.      Performance evaluation ·         Monitoring, measurement, analysis and evaluation ·         Internal audit ·         Management review 10.  Improvement ·         Nonconformity and corrective action ·         Improvement

CMMI SVC-SIX SIGMA for service management

CMMI Benefit

Maturity is about consistency of results, Capability gives the strength to produce good results. Thus CMMI aims at developing the strength to consistently produce good results.

CMMI Model

CMMI consists of Maturity levels and Capability Levels.

CMMI offers two types of representations: Staged and Continuous 

Staged Model: Focus on improving and assessment of pre-defined group of process areas in a particular maturity level.

Continuous model: Focus on improving chosen process areas which consists of assessment of capability level for that particular process area.

Why CMMSVC is important?

Mainly, because of its focus on Risk Management and Service Quality.Service is a key area of focus for every business. Deriving a good Service strategy is extremely important for any business to remain competitive in the market.

Why small firm can choose CMMISVC – Continuous Representation

While CMMI offers strategic benefits, it is often perceived as a costly affair. Large firms have the sufficient and dedicated resources to establish and sustain CMMI practices, while small firms do not have the sufficient bandwidth to implement and sustain CMMI Practices.

CMMI SVC – Continuous Representation offers flexibility to choose process areas based on priority of the business.Priority can be set as per the customer needs of business, risks and challenges.

How does using Six Sigma to implement CMMISVC help?

Six Sigma combining with CMMI SVC Continuous Representation can be a good idea. Select Service Management processes that largely CTQ Customer Requirements. That’s where quick business benefit that can come from.

It can offer following QUICK WINS resulting in better results:

Ø Customer satisfaction

Ø Productivity

Ø Profitability

Ø ROI

Ø Employee satisfaction,

Ø Quality of Service Delivery

If you are a small services firm and would like to explore the CMMI advantage, we will share a consultancy plan with you. You may want to tailor the plan based on your own business needs or priorities.

For a copy of CMMI SVC Process Improvement Plan and Costing Details, Please drop a email to fasttrait@gmail.com