Personal Standards

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Infospectrum, our company is CMMi level 3 and we are now in the process of getting CMMi Level5. Becoming CMMi certified is all about defining, maintaining and improving processes while working in company.


As with any process the whole thing works only if it starts from each individual contributor. The success of company is aggregation of individual successes of all the individuals working for the company. We can track down processes to the individual levels and follow them. A process is a way to extract out the repetitive task from the brain on paper so we become free to invest our brain in more creative tasks. Once the process is set we can rely on the process to take care of the repetitive things and we have space to innovate.

Our personal standards reflect in our processes. I am referring to personal processes. Shall we have personal processes? Actually we always have them in one or the other way. If we start writing them on paper and explicitly making them visible they will help us simplify many day to day tasks.

One of my personal standard is to provide productive 8 hours to the company. So my process is now starting time + 8 hours + 1 hour lunch time + 30 minutes snacks time, which makes the required time as 9 and 1/2 hours. So with this formula I already know the time which I must invest in office to make it productive 8 hours. This calculation sets the exit time very clear in my mind so it does not distract me for any thing other than project tasks till that time. Sometimes when the scheduled tasks get done early than the calculated exit time, I can plan to complete some of the next days tasks in the remaining hours to utilize the remaining time. This way even if there is time available due to early completion of scheduled task it gets utilized and not lost. This can only be achieved by the internal process of setting the exit time.



As CMMi says having processes defined is the first step and we must keep on improving on the processes. Same applies with the personal standards and process. We must keep raising our own standards and keep competing with ourselves, and keep breaking our own records.

with regards
Tushar

(Image courtesy Callum Alden)

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