Part I: Scouting the Territory

Illustration from The Travels of Marco Polo by Witold Gordon (1885–1968)

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)

Man can learn nothing unless he proceeds from the known to the unknown.

—Claude Bernard, French physiologist (1813–1878)

I prepared excitedly for my departure, as if this journey had a mysterious significance. I had decided to change my mode of life. “‘til now,” I told myself, “you have only seen the shadow and been well content with it; now, I am going to lead you into the substance.”

—Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.

—Peter F. Drucker

Before you make any decisions about process improvement and CMMI, you need to scout out the territory—or, if you prefer, sense the gestalt of process improvement—so you have a context as you read further. It is important to understand the rationale behind this type of effort. Without this context, much of the benefit of CMMI or other approaches can be difficult to grasp, and so is much less compelling to you or your management.

In this first part, we act as your reconnaissance scout, providing a manager’s-eye view of the process improvement wilderness. We briefly discuss its history, provide a rationale for your journey, and broadly describe the kind of activities you’ll need to master if you are to return safe and enlightened. We highlight some specific locations you may wish to visit—that is, describe several process models and improvement approaches, all of which can work if applied intelligently and diligently.

All this preparation is not intended to confuse you, but to provide a broader context and more choice in developing your own process improvement strategy. If, after completing Part I, you think that model-based improvement could be useful to you, proceed to Parts II and III, where we’ll get into the details of model-based improvement that will result in added business value for your organization. Then, if you’re really hooked, reading Parts IV and V will take you deeper into the “how-tos” of process improvement.

But, you ask, why would I want to start this journey in the first place? What’s the reward, the business case? Well, that’s a great setup for the next section—so let’s get on with the business at hand and talk about the benefits of process improvement.