If you haven’t yet checked out the Treasury Board of Canada – Chief Information Officer (CIO) Web Site, I suggest you pop in for a look sometime soon.
You’ll be glad you did. You’ll find that this comprehensive site, our pick for Web Site of the Month, has lots of useful information. It’s organized by the Federal government of Canada’s CIO office and can be reached at www.cio-dpi.gc.ca/home_e.html.
The CIO Office of the Canadian Federal Government is engaged in a multi-year initiative supporting the improvement of IT management practices in the Federal Service. Numerous reports, papers, presentations, management checklists and tools have been developed and added to their web site. While the track record of project results has been poor in the past, their organizational improvement efforts have been world class.
I feel the private sector could learn a lot from recent public sector efforts. As always, the first step in learning is to explore other people’s efforts. I particularly like the documentation available in the Enhanced Management Framework (EMF) section of this site. Another significant recent addition is the Portfolio Management section, which focuses on ensuring IT projects are aligned with business priorities and overall management direction.
Plan to spend a few hours surfing this destination. It provides common sense tools, reports, guidelines and numerous other documents that will improve any IT shop’s efforts.
REPORT OF THE MONTH
The feature report this month is a Software Engineering Institute (SEI) document – Overview of the People Capability Maturity Model (CMU/SEI-95-MM-01) – which provides an introduction to the People Capability Maturity Model (P-CMM).
This paper draws on research in the areas of organizational improvement, the benchmarking of management practices and capability maturity models. It also presents a “roadmap” for organizational improvement of your IT management practices, leading to a more effective software development function. A related document to the Overview is the actual People Capability Maturity Model (P-CMM) paper which describes in extensive detail the key practices for each level of capability.
The detail paper describes an evolutionary path from ad hoc, inconsistently performed practices, to a mature, disciplined, and continuously improving development of the knowledge, skills, and motivation of the IT workforce. The overview presents the history of the research efforts and provides the highlights of each capability level (in under 50 pages) with the detail report being over 400 pages long!
Given the increasing amount of money being spent on staff development, the two documents provide an excellent management framework for developing a more effective IT workforce. You may even obtain a few extra dollars from senior management by basing your training efforts on proven and comprehensive staff development management practices.
The two PDF papers are available at:
1. www.sei.cmu.edu/pub/documents/95.reports/pdf/mm001.95.pdf
2. www.sei.cmu.edu/pub/documents/95.reports/pdf/mm002.95.pdf
Dan Swanson is a management consultant with LGS Group in Winnipeg. He specializes in audit and management consulting and can be reached at dswanson@lgs.ca