Authors: Josh Brown, Musangi Muthui, Swati Ramani
Framework Objectives
Business success is tightly correlated to an organization’s ability to recruit, retain and inspire high quality talent who possess the skills necessary to execute on business strategy, and to evolve their capabilities as the business domain and organizational needs change over time.
A critical component of agility is a workforce with the knowledge and skills to make rapid adjustments and the willingness to acquire new competencies (Curtis et. al, 2001).
People CMM argues that “winning the talent wars” is not enough and that organizations must instead focus on creating “learning environments” that can adapt quickly (Curtis et. al, 2001). Strong workforce capability through effective talent management (employee improvement opportunities, recruiting incentives, measurement and continual organization improvement) enables the organization to gain strategic advantage by developing workforce competencies knowledge workers require to support the organization’s core competency, and ability to rapidly evolve as business strategy and market conditions shift (Curtis et. al, 2001).
However, as Humphreys lamented, process improvement cannot be isolated to one area, like software development, and must instead factor in wider reaching process and culture aspects if any change is to be sustainable and successful long term. People CMM works to improve workforce capability so that an organization can maximize the following:
- Readiness for performing its critical business activities,
- Likely results from performing these business activities, and
- Potential for benefiting from investments in process improvement or advanced technology (Curtis et. al, 2001).
Through phased implementation, organizations will improve not only their workforce capability, but also realize gains through better alignment with business objectives, organizational performance, and changing business and market needs (Curtis et. al, 2001).
Together, these changes improve an organization’s agility as well as its effectiveness in executing business strategy to achieve market success.
Key Assumptions
People CMM guides organizations through a series of phases enabling them to:
- Characterize the maturity of their workforce practices
- Establish a program of continuous workforce development
- Set priorities for improvement actions
- Integrate workforce development with process improvement
- Establish a culture of excellence (Curtis et. al, 2001).
For the implementation to be successful, it is assumed that the organization has met certain criteria before proceeding to the next level. Below we outline the key assumptions that must be successfully observed before moving forward towards the next level of maturity. While there are many dimensions to successful organizational performance, People CMM focuses on implementation of practices and metrics to achieve increasing levels of success.
Although attitudes and satisfaction are important predictors of outcomes such as turnover, they do not always provide the guidance necessary for identifying which practices should be improved next. In contrast, the staged framework of the People CMM helps organizations prioritize for their improvement actions (Curtis et. al, 2001).
A level 1 organization is plagued with ad hoc processes and a talent shortage created in part by inconsistency in the organization, an inability to orchestrate effective actions to alleviate talent issues, and management training that is limited and mostly focuses on areas of high legal sensitivity (Curtis et. al, 2001). Their workforce, in general, have either not been trained to carry out their responsibilities, or the organization is lacking in defined work practices. We can identify a Level 1 organization by observing the following characteristics:
- Inconsistency in performing practices
- Displacement of responsibility
- Ritualistic practices
- An emotionally detached workforce (Curtis et. al, 2001).
This organization relies too heavily on employees who are learning by doing from other leaders, leaders who are often ill prepared or inconsistent themselves, or they assume their employees are already equipped with requisite skills appropriate for their role. Level 1 organizations, as a consequence of these assumptions, fail to offer sufficient learning opportunities to their workforce (Curtis et. al, 2001).
Finally, at Level 5, the organization strives for continual improvement by executing ongoing change management activities. We assume that all activities have been successfully completed in the prior four levels in order for the organization to effectively pursue Level 5 objectives that incrementally improvement of workforce practices and processes (Curtis et. al, 2001).
The Maturity Levels of People CMM
Each maturity level provides a layer in the foundation for continuous improvement of an organization’s workforce practices. In maturing from the Initial level to the Managed level, the organization installs the discipline of performing basic workforce practices. In maturing to the defined level, these practices are made to enhance the particular knowledge, skills and work methods that best support the organization’s business. In maturing to the Predictable level, the organization develops competency-based, high performance empowered workgroups, and empirically evaluates how well and effectively its workforce practices are meeting its objectives. Finally in maturing to the optimizing level, the organization looks continually for innovative ways to improve its workforce capability and to support the workforce in its objective of professional excellence.
References
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Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (CMU SEI). (2012). SEI Statistics and History. Retrieved from http://www.sei.cmu.edu/about/statisticshistory.cfm
Curtis, C., Miller, S.A., & Hefley, W.E. (2001). People Capability Maturity Model (PUCMM) Version 2.0. Retrieved from http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/01mm001.cfm
Welbourne, T. M., & Andrews, A. O. (1996). Predicting the Performance of Initial Public Offerings: Should Human Resource Management Be in the Equation? Academy of Management Journal, 39(4): 891U919.
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