Authored by George Zack, President Two Harbors Consulting
– As we have set for the question, “can the frameworks you utilize for business process improvement be leveraged for your personal life,” we will now start to explore that in detail. In this series of posts, I will work through each of the elements of a what the Capability Maturity Model (CMMI) considers a managed or defined process. The goal of this series is to provoke thought how the elements of such generic practices are not only applicable to business, but can have bearing on your personal life. By tying these practices to you personally, I believe it will drive a greater understanding in how they are to be applied in the business setting.
The sixth generic practice (aka GP 2.6) is “control work products.” The model specifically elaborates here to state that this is to “Place selected work products of the process under appropriate levels of control.”
In a business setting this might be assuring that the right versions of policies and procedures and work instructions are appropriately available for people performing the work to access those. It could be having controls in place so that an ingredient or sub-component in your product that can degrade is kept in storage correctly so that you can deliver a high quality product to specification to your customer. It might be that you are keeping your software code in some sort of version management system that has rules defined to keep everyone on the same page as to what is delivered when and what is a sandbox to play in for future development.
As my son starts his sophomore year of high school, a personal endeavor for him, he is determining what each class expects for control of work products. Some teachers expect assignments to be provided on college rule in hand written form, others will only take work submitted through a cloud based service (like a Google Drive), and other teachers further check work with anti-plagerism tools (like Turnitin). In his personal endeavor of school, he has to control work products like assignments, tests, grades and transcripts. Failure to do so means a “missing” grade (which can become a zero), or extra follow up with the teacher (who might have actually misplaced it). In the age of technology, it is harder and harder for kids to say “the dog ate my homework” but they are nonetheless required to “control work products” if they expect to be successful and have a well managed process (of schooling).
We probably all can relate to a having a personal process of managing our finances or our bank account appropriately. There is a concept of version control here: your bank account statement from last month or last year provides a different set of information from your most current one (as does my son’s report card). Appropriately controlling these records or “work products” is necessary for a repeatable and managed.
Again, controlling your work products has natural ties back to the other generic practices. For example, as GP 2.5 is providing training, you’d consider how you have trained on to control these work products and how perhaps training records are kept (if necessary).
On a very personal level, my run training log is something I update daily. In it I include the distance I have run, the time spent and the vertical feet covered at a minimum. It is kept as an online spreadsheet that I limit access to. I have back ups of this “work product” by also uploading run GPS data to various other on line tools that track such things (like Strava). The run log is an important work product for me to keep managed because it is a tracker providing insight as to how I may (or may not) be progressing towards certain goals.
What work products do you control your personal endeavor? Are they adequately controlled? Updated correctly?
