Professional Organizations

Professional Organizations
by Tom Gilchrist CSQE, CSQA and Ron Nelson

Introduction

Quality improvement professionals tell us that approximately 85% of problems in quality, and therefore costly rework, are associated with the technical and managerial processes, rather than any individual performance. In other words, there is greater leverage in doing the right things than doing the wrong things right. In order to significantly improve our technical and managerial processes we must improve our organizational professionalism.

We all have a reasonably common understanding of individual professionalism (those things which lead us to say someone in our field is "good" at their work). In contrast, we have almost no agreement on the meaning of organizational professionalism. This lack of organizational focus is the defining characteristic of the SEI Level 1 environment.

This short paper is concerned with organizational professionalism (i.e., those things that lead us to say an organization is good at its work).

Organizations are not projects

When considering organizational professionalism, we often think of projects, since process documentation, process improvement, reuse, etc., can be deployed and measured in projects. However, projects have a beginning and an end. This distinguishes them from organizations. In organizations with a low level of process maturity, project personnel rarely stay together as a team after the project is completed. Thus, the lessons learned on the project are promptly discarded. The critical difference between a project and an organization is that organizations have a chance at remembering the past, while projects do not.

Figure 1. Organizations Remember, Projects Re-invent.

Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between organization and projects. The organization memory is manifested in its documented practices, while project-level processes die at the project end. Management and technical personnel may come and go, but the organization's behavior is documented for those who come after. To the extent that this is not the case, the organization will have to re-invent itself with each change of personnel, a behavior that is characteristic of SEI Level 1 maturity.

To summarize, project-level professionalism is deficient for two reasons:

Its lessons learned are forgotten when the project ends.
Re-inventing processes each time a project is initiated is expensive and takes little advantage of past experience.

By defining a process at an organizational level, many projects and their new team members can reuse the processes. Processes can be documented and experiences used to improve them without regard to the specifics of individual projects or personnel. In fact, without organizational professionalism, the notion of reuse is of relatively little value when compared to its cost. It has been observed that projects are usually interested in creating reusable items, but have no desire to reuse anyone else's "reusable" elements.

Professional levels

Individual professionalism can be defined as the set of things highly regarded individuals do (or do not do) when performing a task or providing services. These "things" are rarely written down, but are manifested in the actions taken in response to a given situation or stimulus. Individual practice is acquired in many ways and is reinforced and changed by experience, incentives, and peer pressure. Because of the complexity and costs of affecting individual practice, it takes many years to noticeably change individual practice in any given area. An example of this might be the use of high level languages as an accepted way to develop software. It required many years to convince the majority of practitioners that high level languages were superior to assembly language in many general purpose programming tasks.

What makes a good organization

To improve an organization's professionalism, we must focus on factors vital to organizational health and improvement. These include:

Common Vision (pictures we paint of what our organization could be and how it could behave). This vision should reflect our customer's desires as well as our own.
Common Dissatisfactions (those things we know prevent us from realizing the vision).

We desire to resolve the tension between vision and dissatisfaction. The forces which keep us together as an organization, traveling towards our collective vision, must be greater than those things that sap our energy and resources. This requires constant infusion of energy and discipline from each employee of the organization. Otherwise, it will quickly revert to individual practice with loss of benefit.

The need for professional organizations

The problem is that we have neither the time nor the resources to convert individuals one-by-one and practice-by-practice to new ways of software development. Yet we must modify our organizational behavior by creating organization-wide ways of doing business. And we are quickly running out of time.

We need an effective way to gain organizational agreement concerning technical and management practices. At present, essentially all decisions are made by individuals in the course of their daily work. The challenge is to move some of the processes which are being used by individuals to the organizational level. This involves giving up a bit of one's personal freedom in favor of the larger good (i.e., practices leading to less expensive, more timely, and higher quality products). The central difficulty in gaining such agreement is to answer the question, "what's in it for me?" What is the incentive for organizational-wide behavior?

The SEI CMM initiative

Many software organizations are sponsoring initiatives to improve their value to their customers. A growing number of organizations are looking at the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM) to help improve the organizational capability. The SEI CMM is concerned with defining professional behavior at the organizational level. The point is not that the key practices of the SEI CMM initiatives are optimal, but merely that they are gauged at organizational, rather than individual, behavior.

To date, deployment of organization-wide initiatives of any kind has been very spotty and difficult. There are a number of reasons why this is so, but it is likely that one important reason is the lack of common agreement concerning the attributes and importance of organizational professionalism. When can we say that one organization is better than another? The SEI maturity levels are an attempt to answer this question. Do we agree with it? Will our customers appreciate the change? Are there other answers?

Conclusions

The challenges of larger and more complex software systems require that we improve the performance of our software development and maintenance efforts. Quality improvement professionals tell us the only practical strategy promising large benefits is increased professionalism at the organizational level. An outstanding issue is the current lack of agreement concerning the attributes of organizational professionalism. When will we say one organization is better than another? How will we know? If you have any thoughts and ideas about the characteristics of a professional organization, send them to tomg@halcyon.com.

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Orgprof.html, Ver 01/03/02 17:19 , Tom Gilchrist, CSQA, CSQE. For updates, suggestions, and corrections, please contact tomg@tomgtomg.com. The opinions and views expressed in SOFTE are my own and do not reflect the views of my employers.