Change in an organization is not something you can do without having a clear vision on what the objectives are of the change, who is involved (stakeholders), where it hurts, what resistance can be expected to the change, and what the culture is of the organization. Taking all these elements into consideration, you can best start by building a strategic action plan with 3 main inputs:
1/ a GOAL measurement workshop in order to understand what senior management wants to improve in their organization
2/ a CMMI SCAMPI appraisal (software, or service, or acquisition related) or any other valuable type of assessment
3/ a CHANGE READINESS assessment in order to understand how the organization looks and reacts towards a change program taking into account earlier experiences with previous change programs.
Let’s suppose a typical CMMI ML2 process improvement project. The strategic action plan should in fact cover 2 main flows:
- A “CMMI best practices” related flow which focuses on the INSTALLATION of good practices in projects
- A “Change practices” related flow which focuses on the IMPLEMENTATION of the best practices by means of e.g. creating sponsorships, identifying champions, building change agent capabilities, providing training, etc. but also by focusing on a very important element called QUALITY ASSURANCE.
Can Quality Assurance stimulate the acceptance of change and the buy in from the project teams?
The answer is YES, but with the important condition that QA goes beyond the traditional compliance aspect, meaning that also the human aspect of implementing the needed change must be taken into account.
On the other hand, if you implement QA as a means of helping and supporting project teams with their struggle of putting in place effective and efficient project management and (software) engineering practices, you will definitely gain the needed buy-in from these teams and this will certainly give extra fuel to your change program.
To implement the supporting aspect of QA, you can best start by selecting, training and coaching a number of motivated Quality Assurance Coordinators. In collaboration with the QAC’s and the project teams, a number of basic, standard QA-checklists need to be established and applied in order to guide the coaching activities of the QAC’s towards the different project teams. This is what we call “Operational Quality Assurance”, meaning the day-to-day support to the project teams in order to improve their performance and effectiveness.
At the same time, the QAC’s need to perform as well a “governance” kind of QA, by assessing processes and related products in a more stricter (compliance oriented) way. The results of the governance QA are consequently presented during project steering meetings in which the results of quality gate reviews need to be presented and discussed. During a quality gate review, visibility is given on the project realizations (with focus on quality) but also on the planned quality approach for the next project stage(s).
Conclusion of all this is that organizations should never stop at the INSTALLATION of a number of good practices, because they normally would never survive without further support, but they must focus on the IMPLEMENTATION of all these good practices by paying a lot of attention to CHANGE activities. The best type of change activity in this, is the operational type of QUALITY ASSURANCE which will give at the end the best guarantee for a successful implementation of change programs.
