We had some good discussions in LinkedIn’s “Project Acceleration through Commitment-Based Project Management“group with respect to my prior blog. One individual indicated that CBPM should be viewed as another Agile framework, just like Scrum. That idea reinforced my thoughts about CBPM and the fact that it fits properly within the Agile philosophy.
CBPM focuses on getting deliverables done with as few “drag” (non-value or low-value) activities as needed. The owners determine how to deliver on their commitments, including making sure that any dependencies on other deliverables are understood and taken into account. Management oversight is minimal.
The inspect aspect of Agile is addressed via the discussions that owners and customers have on the deliverables and the final say that the customer(s) has/have on whether the deliverable is done or not done. This feature, the need for owners and customers to discuss the scope and status of deliverables, is a variation of the Agile inspect process at the end of an iteration.
Iteration-wise, CBPM is not fixated in any length of the iterations or cycles. The goal is to complete deliverables of value as quickly as possible. Due to its origins in the hardware business, there’s less emphasis in wrapping up a set of deliverables into a release or sprint, although that is very viable.
CBPM is an Agile framework that has some key capabilities (i.e., support for non-software projects) that other Agile frameworks may not. This does not mean that it is not usable in software efforts. As a matter of fact, it can easily be applied to software efforts, even to those run under the waterfall method (gnashing of teeth here! 😉
If Intel can plan and deliver some of the most complex products in the world using CBPM, almost any project can use it.