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Submit I’m following a three day introduction to CMMI 1/119. It is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes. It can be used to guide process improvement across a project, a division, or an entire organization. CMMI helps integrate traditionally separate organizational functions, set process improvement goals and priorities, provide guidance for quality processes, and provide a point of reference for appraising current processes.
You might know it from the CMMI Levels, which indicate the maturity of an organization. Level 0 means “chaos” and complete trust on local hero’s who solve all problems. Level 1 means that processes are performed (dot). Level 2 means that processes are managed. It means e.g. that requirements management incl. traceability is in place (REQM, one of the 7 process areas needed on level 2 others are project planning, configuration management and such), however it does not mean that there is anything useful in there yet. That happens on level 3 when the processes are defined. On the higher level 4 an organization is able to quantitively manage a proces and on level 5 an organization is able to optimize processes.
For any further reading, see the SEI site 1/271 or buy the book Submit (600+ pages of details). I will skip all the rest of the info on CMMI and jump to some personal thoughts I had for a longer time and which re-emerged in my brain during my first courseday.
Groups of people can be scaled from 1 person to 6.6 billion people 7/627:
And in between we have “groupings of humans”. E.g. 4 person could be a household or a pokerclub. 15 persons could be a small company. 150 persons could be a Medium company. 250.000 persons could be an enterprise are a big city.
And we have lots of names of certain groupings of people: geographical indications like towns, suburbs, cities, countries, continents or organizational indications like company, department, non-profit organization, shop or plant and countless other groupings of people.
I have placed some groupings in the image below, obviously you could add (and group) hundreds more e.g. from “sect” to “worldwide organized religion” and so on.
So, as you can see there is a certain form of scalability in place when organizing humans.
From this scalability idea the following points spring in my mind:
1) Where are the scalable human sites? On the internet we find websites and communities for groups, for cities, for countries, for streets and even a few for individuals and some services for households. We also find places for religions, clubs, companies, schools etc.. However there does not seem to be a social community with services which has this scalability idea in place. Meaning: a web application where you can select either to socialize on “6.6 world scale” and slowly slide down to just … you. So I would imagine something like this:
world > continent > country > province > city > suburb > street > house > me
And obviously each “level” would have blogs, forum, wiki, marketplace, photoalbum, advertisements, maps, and so on maybe even targeted to the specific naming of that group e.g. the studenthouse at xxstreet 5 would have services specific for studenthouses and the school at yystreet 10 would have services specific for that school and ofcourse a total different deeper layering e.g.:
world > continent > country > province > city > suburb > street > school “balloon” > class 2a > student
and so on, there are about every possible service provided on the Internet possible to integrate in this web site, you can integrate free webmail on every level, add google maps, wikis, club services, the school login web site and specific sites and services for schools and so. The ideas are endless and the possible revenue is, I think, massive. Advertisers can target streets or complete countries or simply “all schools in country A” and so on. Endless revenue and endless pluggable.
Of course government on all levels can find a communication platform to talk directly to e.g. a street or a suburb, also lots of opportunities here.
2) The other idea which springs in my mind from the scalability issue is the maturity of a group. When we look at these groupings we know that enterprises have invested the most money in optimizing their processes, educating their staff and having the best and most suited assets like software and hardware.
In terms of hardware we see that some hardware is dripping down to even households for usage. We see more complexer networks arising in households for instance.
Software comes in all kinds of degrees of functionality and has e.g. not dripped really through to households except for the operating system. Currently CRM is implemented as “address book” in a households and ERP as “excel budget sheet”. (though with the amount of (connected) hardware and software growing in households we see also the complexity growing in households and therefore the need for somewhat more advanced options to govern the security, operational aspects of the infrastructure and so on. I think there are lots of software applications in place in Enterprises which have not yet been placed in households and other smaller organizations although there is absolutely a large need for this. There are large potential revenue streams / opportunities here also. Just see the zillions of web 2.0 applications and imagine how to group them from an Enterprise perspective for households.
Processes however are not yet landed in households and possibly not in the smaller companies. Although processes and process improvement has exactly the same resistance in larger companies as in smaller companies (and the same benefits on all levels) they are simply not in place. We do see however a growing amount of bits and pieces slowly emerging, the so called life hack sites, question sites, wikis on all kinds topics, “comparison sites”, weblogs with lifetips, forums, communities, zillions of informational sites on all kinds of topics “how can I”.
What is missing is the grouping of these individual “tips” and “how do” items into household or even life patterns and processes just like the Enterprises do. It could end up in a household framework. Individual processes could be “House management” where the purpose is defined, the inputs, the entry criteria, the activities “buy a house”, the roles, the measures, the verification steps, the output, etc… The benefits would be huge: households (including households consisting of 1 person) could find in this library all verified steps to e.g. do the garden, buy a car, manage your financials in all kinds of steps in their life. All verified with proven processes. Everything any expert has learned will be in there. No longer households would have to pick up information accidentally during social visits or by going to sometimes hard learning experiences. The way to go through your life in the best way would be in there.
Don’t understand me wrong. A lot of information in somewhat not-well defined form is available. E.g. for house information I can go to “eigenhuis.nl”. However, it is not defined in process form, in a form which is integrated in a life household framework. This is what Enterprises do: having such a global process framework to not rely on heroic moments or confusion or chaos moments but always on the same defined processes. Typically there is noone to blame if anything goes wrong. If there goes something wrong it is always part of the process and defined.
It also would provide the option to measure the maturity of households. E.g. a level 0 would be a household which is in complete chaos, has large debts, children running naked, addicted parents, uhm.. you name it. A level 4 could be a well organized household who has also pension under control, no debts, nice garden, no discussions on content of things to do. All the knowledge needed to go through life and would be able to measure their progress in life because they would be able to measure the processes that are in place in that point in their life. Think of it as a little company which has a money stream, assets, resources but no defined processes (yet).
Many of the puzzle pieces are already in place, many referential statistical information can already be gathered e.g. from cbs.nl in the netherlands.
There are many more ideas in my head on the scalability idea from 1 person to 6.6. billion people, much, much, much more.
Because I really think this could be useful to humanity I am setting up a forum on HOUSEHOLDFRAMEWORK.ORG (not live yet) to first of all, explore the way we can define the most basic household processes. Undoubtly there will be much discussion about some of these but it is a starting point.
update:
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HOUSEHOLDFRAMEWORK.BIZ SubmitHOUSEHOLDFRAMEWORK.INFO SubmitHOUSEHOLDFRAMEWORK.ORG 1/187HOUSEHOLDFRAMEWORK.COM Submit
Now I have to find out on how to setup a forum on household.org, hold on…
I think you are missing some points here:
- Households are fundamentally different from business entities like shops, factories, service organizations etc. So households don’t scale into large organizations.
- Processes are killing for creativity, innovation and learning so the world would become very boring if everyone is living according to the same standards and processes.
Household life patterns could be an interesting idea though. A mash-up of experiences how you can do certain activities like buying a house, ways to decorate your childrens room etc.. Like you say, most info is already on the web but often hard to find and to combine so a good mash-up site would be very helpful. Such a site would probably be focused on specific regions or countries because of the different languages, rules, values, standards and capabilities in the world.
Regards,
Peter
Peter, thanks for your reaction,
- Households wont scale in large organizations. The purpose is not to support a household to grow into a larger organization but to support the household by growing into a mature household. I know this sounds silly at first hearing, give me some time to setup householdframework.org to explain this more, i have it only 1 day so I need to enter some introduction and purpose there. It will involve household coaching and it will involve both practical stuff, generic patterns and “handy tooling”. And yes, just as agile might be suited for smaller teams and other frameworks/methods for larger, on different spots located projects it will be for the end-user: lean and simple.
- You say that processes are killing creativity and innovation. I don’t agree. I think that when there are no processes that all the time you could have spend on being creative is being spent on being a local hero on which the rest of the team relies, discussion with other on how to do stuff, trying to find out who to blame for this or that, trying to think up own ways of working, making progress reports and information reports for managers and clients while you could stripe all that away if there was a decent process. Not having processes means having an immature chaotic organization full of heros. This does not have anything todo with Agile by the way, i like agile because its lean.
- it will be household life patterns. “how to buy a house” will probably not be a pattern since i think the general abstract process description pattern will be “Buy stuff” or something like that. And then just steps on how to buy stuff and WHY you should buy stuff. The implementation of that pattern in a context would then be “buy a house” which would use the “buy stuff” generic pattern and the specific process “house”.
- Yeah, I think it will be diferent languages for the implementation of the patterns but I really hope that the generic ones could be language independable, I dont know yet if that will work out. I am creating wikis for english en dutch currently.
To be honest I dont know how it will turn up in the end yet, On tooling: I know there will be (online, web2.0, offline) tool linkages for the patterns where they exist and opportunities for tools for patterns where there no tools exist but I must guard that noone will place implicit advertisements or will use the site for its own promotion or something, I will need some admins soon.