I had a client who hired me to give them consulting on their enterprisewide CMMI-based process improvement project. After conducting a baseline appraisal (SCAMPI Class B) and establishing their initial process improvement plans, they were anxious to form working groups to start developing the common processes. I tried to get them to do something different: define the words and phrases that make up the core language of process development implementation. They chose not to follow my advice. After all, everybody knows what we mean when we use words such as project or process or organization, right?

In a word, no. Conduct this experiment: Go to any five people you work with and ask them to independently write down on a piece of paper what organization they belong to. To prove my theory to myself, I did this experiment when I was at CSC. The five people who played along were all in the same organization at some level, but here are the five answers I received:

1. Julie s department

2. Long Beach

3. Application Services Division (ASD)

4. Quality Assurance

5. CSC

All five respondents were absolutely correct, yet in terms of defining the organizational scope of a process improvement project, the five answers were hundreds of thousands of dollars apart from each other.

You ll find the same to be true for other key words such as project. Ask any five people what a project is and you ll get two to five different definitions. Language and definition seems trivial to most;