Real Process Improvement Using the CMMI

Now that you ve read about the importance of defining roles and responsibilities and have hopefully learned some things you can implement in your organization, here are some but not all of the lessons in abbreviated form.

Do

• Understand the difference between roles and job titles or positions . A person having one title may have multiple roles depending on the activity in which she is engaged or depending on a particular situation.

• Before defining roles and responsibilities, establish an architecture or design for documenting them. This will ensure that you codify the critical information for each role defined.

• Learn about the job titles or position titles currently in use in your workplace. They can serve as clues to finding people in the organization who match the roles as they are defined in standard industry terminology.

• View implementing CMMI-based process improvement as an engineering project to develop a process system. When viewed this way, the roles specific to process improvement are similar to the roles needed to successfully plan and execute a system engineering project.

• Identify and define people s roles and responsibilities because it is a critical factor in successful CMMI-based process improvement.

Don t

• Don t assume that peoples job and position titles will describe what they do. Titles are legacy conveniences that have lost meaning through overuse.

• Don t assume that roles (or even job titles or positions) have universal meaning. They vary depending on the size of the organization and the nature of the organization s business.

• Do not think that the organization will go very far with CMMI-based process improvement without defining roles and responsibilities. Failure to accomplish this as one of the first activities of process improvement will result in extensive waste and rework because people will not know who is supposed to do what.