5 - History of a Failed Company - SEI - CMM

The company had also set out it ideals to achieve SEI-CMM level at the earliest. Again a noble cause, but this was a classic example of how toeing the line without being flexible leads one to ones doom.

The SEPG group set out to create a process manual entailing all the processes in a SDLC and managed to do a decent job of it. Where it went wrong was that there was no easy way of following any of the standards. There were not software tools to gather the statistics of errors, no tools to gather the statistics of development. The only tool available was Microsoft Office. Absolutely nothing else, not even a tool to capture the Work Log of the people working on projects.

Here was a 350 strong company that had about 100 people on projects and remaining on 'Bench' and there was dearth of tools. Will somebody tell as to why the abilities of 200 odd people could not be harnessed to create tools for making following the processes setup more smooth?

The SEI CMM process implementation did not flow from the top. The developers were typical developers and felt that documentation was not their cup of tea and not part of their job. The timesheets were just a farce made by the 'Project Manager' at the end of the week. (by Friday a developer almost has forgotten what was addressed on Monday).

Only the Manual grew and grew and grew, not real good practice. People were asked to estimate Java project timelines (involving only batch processing) based on statistics gathered for a VB reporting tool project.

All documentation was made a must must even for reports written in a predefined framework.

All this resulted in a few important clients walking away. Notably PMI, which felt that the time taken to generate the reports were too high. Still the company persisted in continuing with the SEI CMM.