How mature is your framework?

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I have already worked with different customer frameworks, and the companies I worked, they also have their own.Everybody has one, and they all are more or less aligned with the standards: PMI, ITIL, Cobit, Togaf…

Every time I start with a new customer and I dig in the rules of the game (their framework), I ask some basic questions:

  • Does it cover management or it also includes technical and architecture sides of the work?
  • Has it templates? How good are these templates?
  • Do they describe standard processes?
  • Is there supporting tools for working in alignment with the framework? For instance, on management processes, a EPMO environment enables the people to track and report about the different subjects of the project.
  • And the last one: How mature is the utilization of the framework in the organization?

The answer to the last question is the more interesting to me, here is where you can see how committed is an organization in terms of governance and management of all the aspects of the IT activities in an organization.

Not all companies are committed and “married” with their frameworks, and the use demanded to the vendors is not always equal.

In an environment where different vendors are competing and you want to ensure the quality and coordination of the whole implementation of the IT activities, the exhaustive use of a framework is key to promote equal competition and avoid low quality.

This sounds basic, but I have seen this sequence so many times:

  • In short term they accept cheap proposals assuming lower levels of quality in terms of documentation. In the short term, there is not high impact
  • In medium term, when they want to offer new RFPs, they find the situation where the lack of documentation limits the number of providers to compete. The price increases and the quality decreases as in the next projects the lack of updated documentation extends all phases of the projects.
  • Finally, in the long term, you can see how the company decides that it is better to pay to the vendor who has the knowledge to update the documentation, being this process more expensive than the individual update every time you change something.

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