Office Boy

In our office, we have an office boy to serve coffee / tea to the clients [when they come for meetings] and to the staff [sometimes]. The way he makes coffee is little strange and i thought of printing it in my blog.

He will make a paste with coffee creamer, instant coffee granules, sugar and little condensed milk. He will mix the contents to form the paste with full strength and all his effort. He will not even listen to what other's say when he is making this paste. His full concentration will be on getting the paste correct. Once the paste is formed to his expected form, he will add hot water and make coffee. The coffee tastes good [even when we try with the same ingredients, we could not make it as efficient as he does]. When we go for meeting, we will wait for his coffee more than anything. Our clients plan for a meeting in our office mainly because of this coffee guy and they call it as a 'Chemical Solution' - because they had also tried the same combination and never succeeded. Few more days, we can even find a 'Mullah coffee Fan Club' in the orkut community - what can we say?

Now, this guy is a perfect candidate to apply for CMM level 2 [even if not for anything more]. Based on my simple understanding of this model, he has defined a process for coffee making and he is capable of repeating the process over and again at any time without any flaw.

That raises a question back to me...as a matured organization, we cannot achieve this form of repeatability [and still we aim for level 5, which is a different story] - even if it as simple as a two page document or a few lines of code !

Lighter Side:
Similar to his formula of making coffee, he also has a strange practice of using the available resources. He will use one tea spoon per cup and assign that spoon exclusive to the cup. To simplify the statement, if there are three spoons available, then he will make only three cups of coffee at a time.
One day we were sitting in a meeting [about 12 associates]. He was serving only five coffees at a time and between the servings, he took lot of time. Later, we found that, since there were only 5 spoons available, he was not able to make more than 5 cups of coffee at a time and it took lot of time [three rounds] for him to prepare and serve the 12 cups of coffee. We asked him why he is not using the same spoon to make more coffee...in reply, we just got a 'biiiiig smile' from him and we were left clueless if he understood what we said / asked.

[...and that is why he cannot be eligible for any other level of CMM]

For information, CMM levels are as follows: [Refer www.sei.cmu.edu]
1. Initial Level
2. Repeatable Level
3. Defined Level
4. Managed Level
5. Optimizing Level