Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Generic Goals and Practices are Dead. Long live the GGs and GPs!

CMMI 2.0 has dropped the generic goals and practices, or so I’ve heard. I understand why they were created in the first place: ensure the organization institutionalizes its processes. The biggest complaint people had about the generics is that they duplicate much of the process areas’ specific goals and practices.

Generic Practice Process Area
GP 2.2 Plan the Process PP
GP 2.3 Provide Resources PP
GP 2.4 Assign Responsibility PP
GP 2.5 Train People OT
GP 2.6 Control Work Products CM
GP 2.7 Identify and Involve Relevant Stakeholders PP/PMC/IPM
GP 2.8 Monitor and Control the Process PMC/MA
GP 2.9 Objectively Evaluate Adherence PPQA
GP 2.10 Review Status with Higher Level Management PMC
GP 3.1 Establish a Defined Process IPM/OPD
GP 3.2 Collect Process Related Experiences IPM/OPF/OPD

If you’re doing all the stuff identified in the SPs, you’re also probably hitting all the GPs, too.

Before the generics are officially discarded to the dustbin of history, I want to point out one way they can still help: process templates. A level 3 maturity organization should have a defined process for…well…defining their processes. A document that defines a process should be based on a template created by the organization. What questions should we be forcing the author documenting a new process to answer? The generics provide these questions.