When I first heard that the SEI had a lesser-known counterpart to its
Capability Maturity Model (CMM) called People CMM (P-CMM), I had to DuckDuckGo
if it was a joke.
It isn’t, except in the same sense that CMM-I is a kind of cruel joke.
P-CMM uses the same 5 levels as the SEI CMM to “systematically transform
chaotic workforce practices into strategic capability development” across 22
process area. Without any sense of irony, the process professes to “address
critical people issues in your organization”, then immediately dropping the
word “people” in favor of the terms “workforce” and “resource.”
I sat down to lambaste what I view as the outsourcing of thought by management
teams, but then I got to thinking about NIHS (Not Invented Here
Syndrome) in some
organizations, and the (often concurrent) complete outsourcing of thought to
consultants and hype mongers.
Where is the balance of internal capability and external expertise?
I think the scales get tipped one way or another by motivation. I’ve been
brought onboard for two broad categories of needs. I don’t have names for these
two groups, other than to say there are two of them.
There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something
that should not be done at all
— Peter Drucker
Despite what the godfather of management says, what the engineers want to talk
about is:
Programming languages
AI
Cloud providers
UI Libraries
APIs
DevOps
Architecture patterns
Databases
What the customer doesn’t care about: (see above).
The things in the list don’t even matter! They’re fungible. Given three
mainstream choices for programming language, AI, cloud, etc., literally any
combination of them is sufficient.
