"Good management is essential to excellence in operations,
but it takes great leadership to bring about organizational change."
  - Beth Layman

Service Offerings

CMMI® and Best Practice Appraisals

Process reviews and assesments are conducted to compare an organization's current practices against an objective yardstick. Assessments can be used:

1. as a catalyst for iniitiating an improvement program 
2. to measure progress of an ongoing improvement program 
3. to identify differences between processes as documented and those used in actual practice 
4. to officially certify an organization's use of industry best practices such as the CMMI® 

Appraisals are tailored to the client's objectives (e.g. models or frameworks to be employed, which work groups to study, data gathering methods, appraisal team composition, and format for reporting results.) We follow a proven, repeatable process for planning, conducting and reporting to ensure an efficient appraisal and actionable results.

Improvement Program Planning

This series of facilitated workshops is designed to assist organizations which need to make significant improvements, and do so quickly using minimal resources. The workshops help executive sponsors and their improvement teams to plan their approach and chart a course. The techniques employed are the result of many years of experience working in diverse organizational settings with a wide variety of improvement techniques; they incorporate industry-standard organizational improvement frameworks and emphasize organizational change leadership principles. Workshops can focus on building the improvement program infrastructure, designing the process architecture, establishing an overall roadmap, developing detailed pland focused on filling specific gaps, or deploying and institutionalizing new/improved processes.

Improvement Program Health Checks

What does it take to make a process improvement program succeed? Why do so many programs fail or fall short? The recipe for success is complex and the list of ingredients long. "Ingredients" include suasion (communicating the vision clearly and achieving stakeholder buy-in,) disciplined planning, continuity of focus, and relentless execution. A consultant with depth and breadth of improvement program experience can be an invaluable aid to getting things right and avoiding pitfalls. We mentor improvement program sponsors and leaders, assist in defining goals, processes, and plans, then help with monitoring progress and keeping programs on track. Through periodic on-site "health checkups," we help you identify obstacles, recognize risks, and advise on avoiding or ameliorating them.

Portfolio and Project Management

Effective portfoliio and project management are critical to every IT organization. A Project Management Office (PMO,) along with the appropriate executive decision makers, help to ensure that the organization is devoting resources to the right projects and that the project actually produce sound business results. We can help you launch your PMO and establish overall protfolio and project management (PPM) governance. We can also help diagnose the root causes of problems if you are seeking to improve your existing approach to PPM. Whether the focus is project management skill building, PPM best practice and methodology deployment, project progress reviews, or all of the above, we can help!

Project Launch Workshops

Project teams often spin their wheels at the beginning of a project deciding what they need to do and how they will do it. While good planning is a critical success factor in project execution, the time a team spends on planning can be shortened considerably with a Project Launch Workshop. For projects following a traditional lifecycle, the team comes together in a 1- to 3-day facilitated workshop to draft their project management plan and initial effort, cost and schedule estimates. For projects takiing an agile approach, there is likewise planning to be done before development iterations can begin (sometimes referred to as "Iteration Zero".) These workshops are a combination of best-practice discussions and hands-on activities in which team member build (and own) the key elements of their project plan. The plan is ready to be used and the project is ready to "launch" immediately following the workshop.

Measurement Planning Workshops

Today's fast-paced busines environments and projects require just-in-time decision-making based upon the best information available. Organizations face questions such as:

• What improvement initiatives should we fund?
• Which product or service offerings are producing results?
• Will we be shipping the products we promised on time this quarter?

Project teams are concerned about questions such as:

• Are we capable of meeting our schedule?
• Will we be ready to release as planned?
• Have we satsified all customer requirements?

In Measurement Planning Workshops, participants learn through hands-on exercises to use the concepts of Practical Software Measurement (PSM) to define measurement programs that will improve decision-making. (Practical Software Measurement is a popular textbook by Beth Layman, et al that is the basis for several  measurement standards and industry best practices.)

CMMI® Training and Consulting

As a CMMI Institute Partner, Layman & Layman provides consulting and certified training at all maturity levels for both the DEV and SVC models.