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.”
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.
(noun) The theory that systems naturally evolve to perform the same function
through multiple independent mechanisms.
The company maintained three separate customer databases across departments,
each serving identical purposes but requiring distinct maintenance procedures.
(noun) The tendency of systems to resist changes imposed upon them, returning to their original state when external pressure is removed.
When the engineering team tried to implement daily standups, the organization gradually reverted to its previous informal communication patterns within a few months.
