A Foundation for Process Improvement

CMMi, COBIT, ITIL, etc. Has your organization attempted to adopt some or all of these and failed?
What went wrong and why? This article presents a theory and rationale for these failures. It proposes
that an organization must undertake certain activities and acquire certain attributes to succeed in any
process improvement effort.

The Objective
The objective is to change your IS culture from one of "Heroes" to a culture of "Organizational Co

Why would we ant to do this? In a culture of heroes:

• Nothing gets done unless it's a crisis

• Nothing gets done the same way twice - different heroes, different crises, different tools all lead to
different results for the same problem
• There are no processes so there can be no process improvement. Therefore:
o There are no metrics
o There is no, or limited, visibility into how the operating environment is functioning - until
something crashes
 • There is limited knowledge sharing.
o There are islands of "tribal knowledge" unevenly distributed across the organization
o If a specific set of knowledge is the key to being a hero the heroes who have are reluctant to
share it (because it's their key differentiator from all the other heroes in the organization)
o etc.

All of this leads to increased costs just to keep things running and reduces the resources necessary for
developing and deploying new business capabilities. This leads to a decrease in competitiveness for the
business unless all of their competitors are similarly handicapped and how long can that situation last? Sooner
or later a new entrant will appear in the competitive landscape without those handicaps. So what does it take to
change this culture of heroes into one of organizational competence? You can't just start out with ITIL, CMMi, or
any other framework and expect success without having certain critical foundational pieces in place. I call these
pieces 1) Effective Leadership, 2) Visibility, 3) Guiding Principles and 4) Management. The most important of
these pieces is Effective Leadership.

Effective Leadership

Without effective leadership it is better to do nothing than to try and change the current
culture. Why? Because your effort 1) is foredoomed to failure and 2) will likely "poison the
ground" to a greater or lesser extent for future efforts. So what is effective leadership? How
do you know if you have it or not?

First, the effective leader has a singular vision of the future state of the organization. The effective leader does
not necessarily create this vision but the effective leader must own and steward the vision to reality. In RACI
(Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed) terms the effective leader is Accountable for the vision.

Second, the effective leader has the authority to make the changes required implement the vision. The authority
needed is probably a mixture of organizational, "I'm the CIO so just do it.", and charismatic, "My vision is so
compelling, and my presentation so effective, that you just have to follow me.". In any case the challenge for the
effective leader is to introduce change into the organization and evolve the existing culture to one that is aligned
with the vision.
The effective leader must proselytize their vision across the organization so that there is a
singular, shared vision that is understood and honored by all of the stakeholders of the
organization. With this foundation in place you can then be successful in building the next
pieces. Developing Guiding Principles, achieving Visibility across the organization and
enlisting an engaged Management team that "Makes it so".

Guiding Principles, Visibility and Management

Guiding Principles

Guiding Principles begin answering the "How do we get there?" question in moving from vision to reality. This is
what you will use to generate consensus and as touch stones when strong-willed leaders make a
bid to use emotion and passion to overwhelm reason. Get this right, because it matters. Some
examples of Guiding Principles:

��.1 We value business relevance over technology elegance.

��.2 Retail stores must be capable of operating independently of the corporate Data Center
for at least a week.
��.3 Everything is visible to everyone unless overridden by privacy, regulatory or security
concerns.
��.4 We must be a near real-time organization not a batch organization.
��.5 We adopt the right amount of process at the right time.
��.6 Every system solution must have the following environments:

a. Development/Test
b. Quality Assurance
c. Production
��.7 ... and so on and so forth.

Guiding Principles serve as just that, guides that indicate the direction that the organization must go to
make the shared vision a reality. As more and more of the vision and how it will be implemented is
determined the Guiding Principles become incorporated into Standards, standard Processes and Policy.

Visibility

As the old saying goes "You can't manage what you can't measure". And measuring something
requires that it be visible. What is the capacity of our Internet connection? How much of that capacity
are we using at any point in time? Are we trending up or down? What events are we capturing in our
database, application, system and network logs? What could we discover if all of this was visible and
available for data mining? What correlations would be revealed?

Rather than a targeting a specific set of measures a focus on Visibility says that everything should be
visible to everyone; everything being defined as anything that does not violate regulatory, privacy or
policy concerns. This mass of data is available for research, problem solving and monitoring purposes.
Out this mass of data we can then develop the specific set of measures that determine whether we are
succeeding as an organization. As the organization changes the metrics used to determine success will
change. Visibility enables you to make those changes because none of the data, with the exceptions
noted above, is hidden.

Management

Once we have visibility into the state of the organization we can determine what changes we need to
make to improve things. These decisions are meaningless if there is no means of implementing them.
Managers are responsible for allocating resources and prioritizing the implementation of those
decisions. If we do not have a management team that can "Make it so." then having all of the visibility
and guiding principles in the world will have no impact on the organization.

Standards, Processes and Frameworks, Oh my

Guiding Principles evolve into Standards and Processes as they are refined and implemented. You
don't have to build them from the ground up. Between CMMi, Cobit, ITIL and ISO universe there are
a wealth of resources available to help you formalize your practices and processes. Just remember that
no process improvement framework or standard (ITIL, CMMi, COBIT, etc.) is complete in and of
itself. All of them must be tailored to meet the unique needs of your organization and evolved as your
culture and organization matures.
Summary

Moving your organization from a Culture of Heroes to a Culture of Organizational Competency

requires all of these foundational pieces. Missing even one foundational piece spells doom for your
process improvement efforts. Each piece builds upon and requires the other pieces. You can't have
complete visibility into your organization without the leadership and engaged management necessary to
break down the organizational and cultural silos that "guard" access to their unique data. Developing
Guiding Principles in the absence of a singular, shared vision for the future state of the organization is
an exercise in futility since you will never achieve the consensus necessary to put those principles into
action across the organization.

Even with all of the pieces in place changing a culture is hard work. But you now have a foundation to
build on and to grow from.