Creating sustainable growth in a difficult market
The Situation
A Dutch company was using a Romanian software development centre to build their products for the health and financial sectors in the Netherlands. The consultant that had been advising them on how to implement processes recommended that they use me to give them the formal assessment according to the CMMI.
The Task
I came into the organisation to train a team to conduct a formal appraisal and lead the team throughout the process in order to determine the actual state of the organisation.
The Action / Approach
Having conducted the appraisal with the internal team, I had to determine that the organisation had failed quite badly. The failure was largely due to a checklist implementation of the model, not taking into consideration the reality of their business objectives or their local culture. Rather than just telling them that they had failed, I explained what were the consequences and risks of the approach taken and how they could improve it through some relatively simple practices.
The business listened and started to implement some of my recommendations. They understood that getting the certification stamp was not a primary concern and the focus on quality, effectiveness and culture were more important.
They asked me to provide additional training and consulting and I explained that I could not provide them with solutions and conduct the appraisal at the end, so we determined that I could offer theoretical training on the principles of practices such as project management, risk management, measurement based on business goals, etc. I could also point out failings, but could not tell them how to resolve the problem. I continued to provide training and appraisals as the company evolved over several years and also did some coaching outside the original scope (e.g. regarding their proposed merger with a competitor)
The Result
The business publicly acknowledge my role as being key in
- allowing them to grow rapidly in a competitive environment when most other businesses in the same market were contracting,
- achieving the highest level of customer satisfaction in the history of the business,
- achieving the highest level of employee satisfaction in the history of the business, leading to an extremely low staff turnover for the region,
- reducing the amount of waste and the time to market for their development processes,
- giving them the means to double their staffing with no major integration issues.
The business marketing information was revamped to include details about their metrics, explaining to customers exactly how long different design, development, validation and other activities needed to take and what would be the qualitative consequences of trying to shorten the time to do the work correctly.
