Slightly old school meets new world however I have had some success in using this tool with a couple of clients to clarify and order a massive agenda of work into a manageable sequence. Sort of like arranging a menu for a dinner party ( I am a huge fan of seemingly unrelated examples and metaphors)….
- Pump a few drinks and tasty snacks into the guests early to relax them, nothing too complex or else you will ruin their palette, but set them up for the entree.
- Entree creates the momentum for the main course where you complement the meal with a challenging bottle of wine to set off the dish.
- Give them a few minutes to appreciate the main event and begin to digest things, then switch up with desert of a completely different taste – often one that wouldn’t have worked independently of the earlier courses.
- Finally a strong coffee / liqueur / whisky to bookend the dining experience and formally end the festivities.
In a nutshell the perfect approach to satiating your dinner guests / clients! Finding out what guests can stomach is a good idea when planning the menu – challenging them is fine (like giving a west australian shiraz to a frenchman), poisoning them through allergies or offending their ethical/religious views is not!
How do I assess the maturity of my client’s pallettes? In several instances by using the capability matury model.
In future of posts I will run through a couple of methods I have found that can greatly assist in providing some context and definition to xRM practices (both new and existing) within an organisation. The first of which is the concept of a capability maturity model.
Note: The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh initially developed the Capability Maturity Model which I have modified and simplified here. It has been applied extensively for avionics software and for government projects since it was created in the mid-1980s and in my opinion is one of the few frameworks that has become even more relevant in the post internet age!
The xRM Capability Maturity Model (xRM-CMM) is a good way to develop and refine an organisation’s xRM implementation process. A maturity model is a structured collection of elements that describe characteristics of effective processes for utilising and managing the business’s xRM capability.
The xRM maturity model has the benefit of providing organisations with:
- A place to start and organise xRM activities (ingredients)
- The benefit of using their own and the community’s prior experiences (pallete type and known allergies)
- A common language and a shared vision of the required ‘trajectory’ (wording the menu and time between courses)
- A framework for prioritising actions (picking items from the menu)
- A way to define what improvement means (next time you cook the dish)
- A method for benchmarking and performing equivalent comparisons (was this dinner party better than the last one?)
The xRM-CMM I prefer uses a ranking system of five levels, each with a progressively greater capability of producing quality xRM processes. The purpose of the xRM-CMM is to provide guidance for improving an organisation’s processes and it’s ability to manage the development and maintenance of xRM. The xRM-CMM provides a structure that I have found can greatly assist organisations to appraise its maturity with respect to its xRM capability, establish priorities for improvement, and implement these improvements.
The concept of an organisations ‘trajectory’ within the xRM-CMM is of fundamental importance as this recognises the implications from a funding and resourcing perspective as the organisation moves through the various levels.
(The perfect bottle of wine to complement the meal may be a Henschke Hill of Grace however if your budget won’t stretch that far then its no point considering it…)
