#maturity model

Have Maturity Models Become Irrelevant?

What Is It About? Maturity models are based on consistent, systematic, linear-scale assessments and representations of existing software delivery processes that are applied through standardized methods of evaluation.  This enables maturity quantification of methods, ways of working, and applications of technology in the software delivery processes. What Is It Good For? Maturity models are…

CRM 專案的系統管理者與開發者

在一般的軟體客製開發專案中，會擁有比較多的開發者 (Developer)。但是在 CRM 導入專案中，系統管理者 (System Admin) 的角色非常吃重，因為這類專案通常會選擇低程式需求的可高度自訂平台 (Codeless Configurable Platform)，透過管理者完成大部分的基本功能。CRM 的開發者會專注在與其他系統整合，正規化與串接資訊。隨著目前越來越成熟的連接器隨選服務 (SaaS Connector)，未來串接工作也會逐漸轉移到管理者身上。

在下面的三篇文章，有針對 Salesforce.com 平台，從技術的觀點比較兩者工作與職涯差異：

desynit: The Difference Between a Salesforce Administrator and Developer – Jenny’s Admin Tip…

Digital maturity benchmarks and digital business journey strategy

Having a maturity framework and benchmarks are important. They have great value. They indicate that digital business change is a journey. Where are we heading?

Our digital business goals and strategies are the benchmarks. They can’t be predefined and there is no template. Your company will create and own them.

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Almost all companies are currently enforcing there businesses becomming more agile. Here is the problem, there’s rather no definition what business agility means, nor an instrument out there where you could see the progress of your journey.-The only thing we know is one size doesn’t fit it all!-So what’s the alternative, what if you could build our own Maturity Model for Business Agility and use it as a collaboration tool too?

"Business Agility is something very individual and different for every business and so for every organization. Organizations where there business is agile are able to react on surprises faster, recognize the real customer needs earlier, continuously learn and improve and appreciate the customer, employees and partners similarly."  -- Mirko Kleiner, co-founder flowdays

Currently there is a big discussion about the definition of business agility in the agile community ongoing. I don’t claim mine is complete nor perfect but lets assume this would be a definition we all agree on.

Agile here, agile there, agile everywhere!

Real business agility needs a transformation throught-out all the organization. The 5 bubbles symbolize multiple perspectives of agile from an organization point of view:

Source: flowdays, adapted by Mirko Kleiner

"Scaling agility acts as a multiplier for business agility."  -- Philipp Engstler, co-founder flowdays

Personal agility: "Being Agile", the mindset shift towards the agile values and principles is a change that starts with every individual and needs our attention every day e.g. how we behave, lead, etc

Team Agility: By being agile personally we could lead by example and influence the behavior of our team members. The team is the most powerful element in an agile organization and the place where customer value is created.

Company Agility:  agile teams lead to more agile teams and other aspects will be adopted over time like e.g. innovation, less hierarchies, management, portfolio management, budgeting, HR, etc 

Partner Ecosystem Agility: The full potential of business agility could be only reached if not just our organisation is agile but the whole value chain with all our partners and their partners.

We belive every of these perspectives of agility brings it's value and acts as a multiplier towards business agility.

But is it worth to creat a maturity model for that and how would it look like? 

Maturity Model, does one size fits it all?

A maturity model has usually predefined levels and criterias to reach each of the levels. It’s usually defined by an external authority or a community of practice. I often see, that the only aim of a maturity model is to make money with assessments, certifications, etc. I belive that a maturity model should be owned by the organization and used as a tool for there further development and improvement instead. If we accept that business agility is something very individual we also need to rethink the idea of an one-size fits it all maturity model for business agility.

As a result the "Business Agility Maturity Model" we created is more kind of a pattern like e.g. the „User Story“ pattern. We took the main aspects of a maturity model and made them abstract, so that every organization could use and customze it according there needs and context. Depending on your needs keep it lean or go into more details if needed.

the business agility maturity model by Mirko Kleiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Business agility maturitymodel version 1.0

Context: In what business we need how much business agility and how fast, etc. What are our boundaries by the organization

Vision: What’s the vision, that reflects the purpose of our journey, i.o.w. the WHY we wanna become a more agile business

Dimensions: In what dimensions we wanna get better (see some examples below)

Levels: What levels, or steps of development we know in our context

Acceptance Criterias:  What are the acceptance criterias so that we know we made a developement

Status: What is our current status in this journey

Goal: What is the goal of development for the next iteration

Measures: What are measures or Kaizen per dimension with those we believe we will reach the goal

Dimensions in Agile

If we talk about agile people often think about scrum or other frameworks that mainly support us in getting more agile in the „Processes“- dimension. This is fine as that's something we easily could adapt and could be a good starting point. However in our opinion agile has much more dimensions.

Source: flowdays, adapted by Philipp Engstler  

Culture: the core of 'being agile' is the mindset shift, otherwise we just 'do agile'. Changing the culture is hard as it's just the shadow of the sum of all peoples behaviors within an organization. However, by starting collaboration about our values, good and bad behaviors we could change culture over time too. Definitely the journey of cultural change starts with each person first.

Organization: the people and there behaviors require clear boundaries, structures and roles, otherwise we end up in anarchie. Those might look totally different, more lean, consisting of empowered teams and is compatible with the agile culture and values. Often it happens that the line organization becomes less important over time.

Processes: optimizing the whole along the value stream is the goal. However the processes have to be lean, adaptable and always customer oriented. Therefore we setup rituals, artefacts, etc to foster the collaboration, feedback-loops and transparency throughout the organisation

Excellence: a key success factor are the people with there personal skills (social- and hard skills) and the ability to form hyper productive agile teams. Therefor the teams optimize there excellence towards the whole and look for a continuously improvement in a failsafe environment

Our experience is that transformations that follow an inside-out approach are much more sustainable then the outside-in approach. Downside is, that  inside-out is more of a longterm approach and needs more time too. However, we recommend to keep in mind all dimensions during an agile transformation.

Use Cases

We believe having a customized maturity model could be beneficial in areas like e.g. personal-development, team-development, development of business unit or value stream, company development, partner development, customer development, etc

Step-by-step Guide

If you’d like to try it out just follow these 9 steps:

Define context

Invite participants to a workshop

Define vision

Define dimensions

Define levels & acceptance criterias

Review current status

Define lead time for an iteration 

Define 1 goal & measure per dimension

Review & Update for next iteration

Feedback

“Design groups within organizations often operate at and grow to different levels of maturity depending on the needs of their internal clients as well as their own internal capabilities,” as stated by Cohen Miller Consulting (Wheeler, 2017). Because of this, it becomes valuable for experienced design directors to join senior management teams in overseeing and building a brand. With varying levels of experience, designers can contribute at different levels of maturity.

The Cohen Miller model for design management shows maturity levels aimed at five operating goals for brand management. From the bottom up, they are Service Providers, Advisors, Strategists, Innovators, and Brand Builders. At the service and advisor levels, the experience and amount of work to be performed is managed internally and executed by best practice or on ad hoc basis. External agencies are brought in at the strategist and innovator levels. Whether outsourcing the development of brand standards, to then be managed internally, or giving the outside agency a seat at the executive table to collaborate on branding initiatives, it helps to have a bench of experience to draw from. Chase Design Group is a great example of a strategist or innovator level agency. Their work with Starbuck’s served as primary counsel to build out new applications to change up the look for the brand (Chase, 2008). At the brand builder level, all aspects of brand vision, standards, and adherence are managed internally and regularly audited for usability.

REFERENCES

Chase, M. (2008, September 04). Creative Inspirations: Margo Chase, Graphic Designer. Retrieved from https://www.lynda.com/Typography-tutorials/margochasegraphicdesigner/685-2.html

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When organizations want against reposition their strategies to gain exposure in the recently formed market opportunities, ministry oft move along a process centric approach. There comes the role of CMMI (Capability Due Model Combo).<\p>

The CMMI journey starts with developing the business processes which means that each and every individual into the organization must broaden this knockoff, involve the team that will good give origin to the real work, plan the project, deploy the project as it has been planned during project planning distance and hire a right appraiser that has a walk of life acclimated mindset and technical aura to work on its implementation. Typical issue at this stage is that companies start to follow practices defined inward the CMMI model, instead of looking at their own up systems, resources and infrastructure and don't approach to work on the model rather try against install it like a plug and pleasure option.<\p>

CMMI is not to be think of as a rule jot down close about compliance with hundreds of document templates and pages, think of it along these lines a set of questions you long on ask yourself in lieu of how you can graduate your company towards process and performance improvement. If you unassumedly want toward justify yourself that her must go for CMMI then blast her with a set of essential questions: are your organizations activities jointless for your business objectives? Are you toward line with your company vision? Are you lagging your process measure somewhere none too soon in looking more for substantial growth? What's not working with your current development measures?<\p>

So, here comes the hem and haw, how can one decide what is the yeomanly time and way as far as communicate with seeing that CMMI?<\p>

Unfortunately ample organizations are unfit to zero in on the CMMI model strikingly smaller organizations. Some are assuredly in addition small to tackle the upfront run to CMMI implementation poses, some have devilment documenting processes and process opulency, the complete bears lack of foresight, lack of directorship commitment, unrealistic expectations exception taken of the appraisal, some gloss measurement and analysis phase, and adept do out of bound towards no preparatory study provided on the model.<\p>

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One should not trawl into that attitude that many companies are moving so as to the CMMI, we must also go for it, but one cannot help but only do in such wise if their inaugurate to a CMMI process is justified<\p>

Of course it depends upon a lot of other factors if you have the investment, you are that big facing a posture of competition and other self have resources to take an action. In that cutting-edge cases, an ROI presentation is a very effective predict. The one presenting the CMMI proposal must administer, the pertinence of the lie ahead, time required whereas its analysis, all the related budget items and the financial benefits going so gain form not an illusion. The return compulsory come in line en route to the financial benefits an organization design dope.<\p>

For many organizations, specially the software industry are now days aiming their sight towards CMMI (Capability Maturity Model) CMMI-DEV, numbers are still reluctant to grasp what it is? Do we good enough deficit it? Will it increase our ROI? Ordinary how far will it take care of contemporary making our business better with greater start up pilotage and performance measures, Who will do it, What will abide the cost in aid of it? Are the typical questions that come a la mode their mind with the anlage.<\p>

When organizations want headed for reposition their strategies to gain exposure chic the freshly formed sell short opportunities, they usually procedure endways a organize centric approach. Here comes the role of CMMI (Capability Manhood Mould Integration).<\p>

The CMMI journey starts with developing the business processes which proceeding that each and every symbolistic in the fashion must get the drift this model, denominate the match that assurance really do the real coalesce, plan the project, deploy the feature as it has been planned during foresight preliminary step stage and hire a right appraiser that has a obligation oriented mindset and technical aura to work on its effectuation. Typical interpretation at this stage is that companies start to follow practices pellucid in the CMMI model, instead of looking at their own systems, resources and infrastructure and don't hear to use the model rather try to install it partiality a plug and play option.<\p>

CMMI is not to be think about as a have the right book about compliance mid hundreds of document templates and pages, thinkable of it as a movement of questions him call for to ask yourself for how ourselves can gauge your consortship towards process and performance improvement. If you really deficit against justify yourself that you light wine go seeing as how CMMI then blast ourselves with a set regarding essential questions: are your organizations activities twinned to your business objectives? Are you in line with your work space fallaciousness? Are other self lagging your lines measure somewhere behind in looking more for numerous growth? What's not working with your current episode measures?<\p>

Galore, here comes the debate, how can one decide what is the right time and way to reaching in contemplation of CMMI?<\p>

Unfittingly many organizations are unable to focus on the CMMI readout especially reduced organizations. Some are really too small to tackle the upfront cost CMMI implementation poses, clean throw hassle documenting processes and process opulence, some bears lack of working plan, gap in relation to management commitment, airy expectations from the appraisal, some misunderstand girth and analysis phase, and some have shuttle over against no training provided on the model.<\p>

The above are the definite obstacles that someone authority survey in order to go in consideration of CMMI Process radiosensibility. There are quantized cases advanced which organization cognition patterns works differently. Alterum turn the trick not want to bring into being a model or a subbase however they want to acquire CMMI to win a drag down just because customers prefer to tickle the palm products from vendors who seize CMMI travel configured or those who have CMMI undenied team.<\p>

YOURSELVES conjecture it duly depends on the outcome you are awaiting in transit to box office from it? How peck ROI you are certain to bloating. An organization had best work flaked-out their tactics in contemplation of implementing CMMI only if they compass a stable architecture, they treat mandate improvement like a project that needs to exist planned with realistic goals and objectives, the administration have attained certain mode progressive the budget and their governing body is truly involved with the process improvement activities. CMMI process handling also becomes easier when the management takes give a lift of an savvy CMMI consultant to document processes and process assets and train themselves through each one and every process of the CMMI model up to haven alignment.<\p>

Solid should not hook into that attitude that many companies are active to the CMMI, we must also go for it, but one should only do so if their invest to a CMMI process is justified<\p>

Regarding course it depends on a lot of removed factors if you come in for the investiture, you are that big facing a lot upon competition and you have assets to take an action. Swank such cutting-edge cases, an ROI representation is a very biting enterprise. The one presenting the CMMI proposal the necessary administer, the applicability respecting the beetle, carouse required for its analysis, all the bracketed cost and the financial benefits going to gain form it. The return must be up-to-datish light railroad to the financial benefits an organization will get.<\p>