Can CMMI, Lean, TOC, 6 Sigma, and Agile Play Together – They Better

There’s been a lot of chatter in the blogosphere lately about various different models, methods, and tools; and, not unsurprisingly about which one is best. It’s not a zero sum game; there can be more than one winner. In fact, if you adopt the best attributes of all of them, you’ll certainly be better off for it.

CMMI presents a set of industry agreed to best practices. If you develop your own company’s best practices for the management and development of projects, and then map them to the CMMI with an eye toward addressing the CMMI best practices, you can’t really go wrong.

Lean is based foundationally on the Toyota Production System, and is a combination of methodology and tools that seeks to improve the flow of work products through the system, while at the same time eliminating the many causes of waste inherent in any system. By mapping the as executed processes, you can determine if there are any wasted steps, motions, meetings, etc. The improvement of flow and the elimination of waste can not help but improve the efficiency of your business.

Theory of Constraints is based on the premise that there are constraints or bottlenecks in any system. To the extent that you can successfully mitigate the effect of the constraint on the system, your organization’s throughput will increase.

6 Sigma is a statistically based tool that seeks to identify and analyze the causes of process variation so they can be reduced or eliminated. Variation causes risk to the success of your project, because variation means that your predictions are only accurate to within the limits of the variation. To mitigate the risk you must allocate contingency buffers to ensure that your degree of uncertainty is covered by the additional set asides, which then can not be used for other purposes.

Agile is a project management methodology that builds foundationally on Lean and 6 Sigma; with its most obvious characteristics being frequent face to face meetings of the stakeholders to ensure the latest plan/iteration pair is on track; and, decomposing large projects into small timeboxes, iterations, sprints depending on your terminological preferences, so you can’t go too far astray before the next meeting to sync up on progress.

Nowhere in any of them does it say if you use one you may NOT use the other.