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

Service Offerings

®CMMI and Best Practice Appraisals

Process reviews and assessments are conducted to compare an organization’s current practices against an objective yardstick. Assessments can be used 1) as a catalyst for initiating an improvement program, 2) to measure progress of a ongoing improvement program, 3) to identify differences between processes as documented on paper and those used in actual practice and 4) to officially acknowledge an organization’s use of industry best practices like the CMMI.  Appraisals are tailored to the client's objectives (which work groups to study, models and frameworks to be employed, data gathering methods, 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 that need to make significant improvements and do so quickly using minimal resources. The workshops help executive sponsors and their improvement teams plan their approach and chart their course. The techniques used are the result of many years of experience working with a wide variety of organizations and 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 plans focused on filling specific gaps, or deploying and institutionalizing new/improved processes.

Improvement Program Health Checks

What does it take to make an improvement program succeed, and why do so many of them fall short? The recipe for success is complex and the list of ingredients is long. "Ingredients” range from suasion (such as communicating the vision clearly and achieving stakeholder buy-in) to 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 sponsors and improvement leaders, assist in defining goals, processes, and plans, and help in monitoring progress and keeping programs on track. Through regular on-site "health checkups" we help you recognize risks and obstacles and advise on ameliorating them.

Portfolio and Project Management

Effective portfolio and project management is critical to every IT organization. A Project Management Office (PMO), along with the appropriate executive decision-makers, helps to ensure that the organization is devoting resources to the right projects and that the projects actually produce sound business results. We can help you launch your PMO and establish overall portfolio 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 successful project execution, the time a team spends planning can be shortened considerably with a Project Launch Workshop. Project teams come together in a 1-3 day facilitated workshop to draft their project management plan and initial effort, cost, and schedule estimates. The workshop is a combination of best practice discussions and hands-on activities in which team members build the key components 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 business and project environments require just-in-time decision-making, based on the best information available. Organizations face decisions such as: what improvement initiatives should we fund; which offerings are producing results; and will we be shipping the products we promised on time this quarter? Project teams are concerned about their ability to meet schedules, whether they will be ready to release as planned, and whether all customer requirements have been satisfied. In these workshops, participants learn to use the concepts of Practical Software Measurement (PSM) to define measurement programs that help improve decision-making. (PSM is a popular textbook co-authored by Beth Layman and is the basis for several industry measurement best practices and standards.)