CMMI Facilitator: Not An Easy Job

CMMI stands for Capability Maturity Model, Integrated. CMMI is a way of telling you how mature and integrated all you processes are. If it sounds boring, it is. The big blue book is about 300 pages and I read the whole thing. But of course, there are a lot of books now about CMMI.
Don't get me wrong -- I think CMMI is great. It's just a) impossible to teach, and b)not a practical way of doing your work. It's a great way of measuring how well you do your work, but it sucks at telling you how to do it.
I've been involved in CMMI implementations and RUP implementations. RUP is just the opposite: it tells you how to do everything, and how to do nothing. If you want to find a dissertation on the intricacies of stakeholder collusion in use-case management, RUP is just what you are looking for. But if you want to measure how well you're doing your processes? Forget about it.
My CMMI friends always wince when I mention the RUP -- as if somehow I've joined a motorcylce gang and am running drugs on the weekends. My RUP friends? When I mention just the acronym CMMI their eyes glaze over and they suddenly feel sleepy. It's a shame, because both process worlds have a lot to learn from each other.
The key problems with CMMI are lanugage, definitions, buy-in, and acceptance. The key problems with the RUP are buy-in, acceptance, customization, and measurement.
When I'm faciliating CMMI groups, it's all about definitions: I told a good friend of mine that I knew a company was heading for a CMMI certification. "What's their defect taxonomy? Is an integrated buy-in, or just a sham?"
My friend was right on the money. Unless you have a common language, defect tracking is a joke, and CMMI is all about statistical process control at the end of the day.
Buy-in is killing all of these projects. (We call them process institutationalizaions -- remember, good consultants get paid by the syllable) You can have the best recipe, the best team, and the best managers in the world, but if the dogs do not like the dog food, they are not going to eat it. So many times these projects get hatched by some red-haired stepchild group without executive-level support. That just makes it all the more interesting.
So yes, it's a challenging job, but it is one of the tougher ones out there, and we don't want life to be boring, do we?