Want fast, easy CMMI ratings?  Even high maturity?

First, implement lean, Goldratt’s TOC, Deming’s ideas, Kanban, and other related concepts, then get busy with CMMI.

What you may not know is that lean is easier, faster, and generates better performance results sooner than CMMI.

Lean improves delivery issues sooner than process improvement alone.  Improved deliveries improves revenues, stabilizes cash flow, increases margin, makes customers happier and results in more sales.

In other words, lean means better flow and better flow means better business.

CMMI is great, but is often attempted as a first line of offense to issues it’s not meant to deal with.  CMMI is meant to improve flow, not define it, and, lean helps define flow.
(Yes, I know I said "theory of constraints" twice.)

Assuming there are unfulfilled orders in the sales pipeline, lack of revenue is due to lack of flow.  Typically, this is due more to what’s in the flow, how much is in it, and the clarity and cleanliness of how the operation’s flow is aligned.  Using CMMI to "fix" issues with flow is like using the Brownian motion of steeping tea to power a random-number generator.  It’s just too much too soon.  Process issues are themselves symptoms of flow issues.

Deal with the symptoms first.  Then, tackle the processes.

Two events to put on your radar:

Lean Software and Systems Conference: Boston, 13-18 May (Lean Camp & Lean Action Kitchen, Sunday, Conference Monday-Wednesday, and Tutorials Thursday & Friday).  I’m helping to organize and speaking at the conference, and running a tutorial on this topic on Thursday.

Kanban Change Agent Masterclass: Miami, 23-25 May.  I’ll be participating as a special guest to demonstrate how Kanban helps achieve CMMI ratings, including High Maturity.

I’m speaking @ the Lean Software and Systems Conference 2011.

The program is amazing!

I highly encourage attendance.

There’s an entire day in cooperation with the SEI with 3 unique tracks on it including a track on CMMI and Multi-Modal Processes (which I’m chairing).

Take a look at my talk… it’s from my upcoming book: High Performance Operations.

Register quickly and make your hotel reservations! Block rooms are nearly gone!

With yesterday being the "tutorial day" ahead of the conference, today was the official kick-off day of the conference sessions.

Morning started off in a laid-back way.  Even better than sleeping until 7am was having breakfast with Pat O’Toole,  Just a never-ending fount of wisdom and experience.  Truly, if I ever needed an injection of fresh ideas for my practice, I’d start with him.  We are all blessed with different advantages, one (or two?) of Pat’s is having two brothers who are both behavioral psychologists from whom he siphons oodles (technical term) of techniques.

After missing the plenary sessions, my first attended session was David Anderson’s CMMI Through a Lean Lens.  Excellent stuff!  What I enjoyed most about it was how easily and convincingly one can see the benefits and accessibility of high maturity behavior with very little data and no artificial, convoluted process models.  Nothing more than a few simple development "states" and a calendar.  The richness of something as simple as a cumulative flow diagram was very well presented and, I believe, quickly grasped by the audience. 

David had some suggestions for CMMI v2.0 to accommodate "continuous flow" instead of "transactional processes".  He also suggested that continuous flow lent itself more to perceiving development as a service rather than a discrete project effort.  It was very telling (to me) how eager the audience is growing over just a couple of years for this sort of data that they were raptly engaged in David’s content and seemed unconcerned for over-staying the room’s allocated time for his talk.

Next up was Judah Mogilensky’s proposal for a new CMMI process area called Fantasy Development.  He started out with a brief overview of an earlier proposed process area, Blame Allocation, which has strong strategic ties to the Fantasy Development process area.  Of many, one priceless anecdote was, "What’s with all this stuff about managing requirements and planning, and measuring progress?  Why can’t CMMI have anything in it that we actually do?!?!"

Sadly, he’s not joking.  He’s heard this before as have I.  Not realizing what they’re admitting, people who don’t understand CMMI are missing the connection between CMMI and their real work.  Unfortunately, whether they admit it or not, many organizations have very well-established and highly productive processes for allocating blame and developing fantasies for which Judah’s proposed PAs are meant to help improve. 

As with earlier incarnations of these proposals, Judah made an important point: any area of work important to an organization can be improved with and measured against improvement practices and goals of their own creation.  Nothing says CMMI must be the only source of improvement ideas.

Since he would be leaving later in the day, I spent a while after lunch with David to discuss ideas on lean and CMMI.  It’s becoming clear that the world cannot wait for SEI or annual LSSC events to bring these topics together.  There’s just too much synergy, both in terms of maturing organizational processes (from both a CMMI and non-CMMI perspective) and in terms of affecting culture and behavior that enables and promotes the quantification of these improvements. 

Something I observed on the Savannah River on my way back to my hotel was blissfully (in a geeky way) appropriate for discussing continuous flow with David.  (Watch the video if you’re interested in that.)  He came to the same conclusion as I did, and, it was exactly what the deck hand on the ferry said happens in such situations.

David and I went to see Pat O’Toole’s session on "Maturity Level 4 Results in a Lot of BS."  Never at a loss for a compelling title, Pat’s topic had to do with behavior, not what you might think. His example walked through 10 behaviors of high maturity teams that were exhibited by an appraisal team by the mere tracking and projecting of time during a particular appraisal task near the end of an appraisal.  His example (masterfully, of course) demonstrated simple measurement and analysis traits with profound effects on both performance and behavior while they were being tabulated in real time.  It was like watching magic.  Not in the "unbelievable" sense, but in the "pure beauty of simplicity" sense.  David and I made quick note that Pat would be a must in any sort of Lean-CMMI event.

The conference gala reception ended the official activities.  The simple movie-theater theme included rooms where two modern films shot in Savannah were playing: Forrest Gump, and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and a movie-style.concession stand full of popcorn, candy bars, nachos & cheese and Cracker Jack.

Not all rosy

Although I led the reviewer group for agile content for this year’s conference, I was not able to commit to attending all the agile-related presentations.  So I am making it a point to query people attending these sessions for their immediate reactions.  Reports from several people about presentations and tutorial content on "agile" topics is revealing a disappointing condition.  Namely, that the "dark side" of the force is still strong in much of the content people are communicating.  Several manifestations are cropping up including poor understanding of true "agility" and "lean" concepts and practices, re-purposing traditional approaches but calling them "agile" or "lean" by merely eliminating the obvious waste, and diluting the benefits of CMMI to enable achievement of ratings by teams using agile.

What’s most disappointing is that this content is supposedly the "best" of the crop of submitted abstracts which tells me that we need a better topic submission and review process.  Namely, that what we ask for when proposing topics needs to be improved, and, how we review the proposals needs to be changed.  A few years ago, the conference committee attempted an overall broad-based improvement for similar reasons but only came up with increasing the word-count on abstracts and asking for "take-aways" for each proposal.  I guess this falls under the category of, "just because a little isn’t good, doesn’t mean more is better."

We need a better process.  I’ll be providing that feedback at tomorrow’s conference retrospective.

Day’s Conclusion

One thing was abundantly clear from today: I was being given glimpses of the same idea over and over from many facets.  That idea was about behavior.  Behavior is central to improvement.  End of discussion.

Culture will follow behavior, whether good or bad.  People’s responses to input will be manifested in their behavior and that will be in response to the stimulus.  I’ve known the central criticality of behavior in the continuum of improvement.  However, the key "nugget" for me today was that it’s surprisingly simple to influence behavior in positive, productive, value-added ways.  And, it’s also not as hard as we might think to turn "bad" behavior around with similarly simple, yet powerful examples of the benefits we want when we conduct ourselves with the behaviors that achieve them.

My conversation with Pat at breakfast, David’s cumulative flow diagram, Judah’s tongue-in-cheek process areas, the port’s fast clearing of their container backlog, Pat’s "BS" presentation, and other side-conversations I won’t detail here, all orbited on this one theme: behavior and how we affect it is the future of business performance improvement and we’d better get on that ferry right now.

So today started out with a bus ride from the hotel to the Savannah International Trade and Convention Center rather than the expected ferry ride over the river.  A container ship in the port managed to get damaged and leaked fuel into the Savannah River on Sunday immediately closing the river to non-clean-up traffic, including the otherwise convenient cross-river ferry.

Be that as it may, the bus ride gave me an opportunity to connect with Michele Moss from Booz-Allen, Hamilton.  A kindred spirit in things related to "the future of process".  She and I had plans to meet anyway some time today to discuss ideas about "bringing ‘younger people’ into the field" and a related topic, addressing modern-day issues such as cyber, agile and value as these concerns are manifested in processes and process improvement.

First order of the day after registration was to co-create what I perceived as a rather successful (and well-attended) tutorial with Judah Mogilensky on a tailoring for SCAMPI appraisals that increases efficiency, collaboration, and reduces time and cost, we called "One-Stop Shopping".  Immediately following, Michele and I met with Bob Rosenstein, the events and conferences manager at SEI.  David Anderson, just arriving to the venue, was a very beneficial addition to the discussion, conveying his experience with creating communities and conferences specific to a community such as his LSSC.  Dana Hanzlik and Danny Pipitone from SEI’s PR group also sat in on the conversation.  About the only definitive expectation to come out of this meeting (other than our commitment to come to the retrospective with with data from the Peer-to-Peer), was that SEI will be open to more closely tying into other gatherings.  Not bad since we had no expectations going in, and, even if we had, it wouldn’t have been reasonable to have expected any commitments.

Much came up in just under an hour with Bob.  We’re planning to include bits of this topic in our end-of-conference committee retrospective on Thursday.  Part of what will feed into that retrospective will be a Peer-to-Peer session on Wednesday afternoon that Michele and I will be co-creating and was planned with David’s help.  Our Peer-to-Peer is being billed as, "Where do we go from here? Value, Agile, Cyber, and all things Future Processes."

The mind-map of the problem-space was really intriguing.  This will not be an easy matter.

After a conference lunch with David and Michele, we split up and I attended the invitation-only advanced overview of the changes to "high maturity" to CMMI v1.3.  Good stuff, really.  Way too geek for here.

After getting as much as I cared to get from the high maturity campfire (which coincided with the moment I sensed my lunch moved far enough down my digestive tract to make room (literally) for a run) I decided to go back to my hotel to squeeze a run in before the evening gorge-fest that includes the opening of the trade-show floor, a board meeting, and later, a surprise opportunity to attend a special reception, all of which were to include food (and in order of continually improving quality at that).

Before I could get back across the river, I nabbed an opportunity to comment on a frequent occurrence here, on the Savannah River:

Several lovely hours later of socializing (albeit, mostly work-related) I’m back at the room planning my day ahead.

San Jose, CA.  Behold: Alistair Cockburn.  At the end of SEPG-Europe 2008, I was in a conversation with SEPG program chair, Dr. Caroline Graettinger.  We were discussing the theme of the 2009 series of SEPG conferences on Next Generation of process.  I immediately thought of and fired off an email to Alistair.  Intrigued, he said that he’s working on a very similar sounding set of ideas calling them, Software Development in the 21st Century, and accepted shortly thereafter.

This ideas are based in metaphors to help really manage software development the way software is really developed.  Cooperative Games, Craft, and Lean.  The details of this talk are on Alistair’s web site.

Alistair was poignant (despite mentioning me by name) and funny and fielded questions from the audience.  Kudos my friend.

Another Jim as Sr. Director for Software Quality, Jim Sartain, currently at Adobe, came next.  Previously at Intuit and before then HP.  Leading with the fact that TSP goes where he goes.  (See more later.)  He showed the same slide from yesterday’s Intuit presentation showing "most admired companies" where Intuit is #1 and Adobe is #2.

ANOTHER "quality" person with a REAL personality!  A clean-sweep for great SEPG speakers!  Too bad the economy kept more people from experiencing them!

Jim spoke about giving engineers the tools and work-life balance that can double their productivity and morale. Note: research this when there’s time.  And while I’m at it, research why it’s the commercial companies of the world who truly embrace quality culture and the government-oriented ones don’t.  (Never mind, that’s rhetorical.)

Wanna "get" how serious they are?  They frakking flew Watts Humphrey in to San Jose to launch TSP and brought as many engineers from around the world in to hear it.  But since their operations in India are so significant, they did it again in India!

Their results with TSP are beyond quality improvements, but work-life balance, team commitment, team self-direction, senior leadership buy-in (removing obstacles).  TSP provided a means of measuring the effort and using that data to negotiate better expectations.  (Both Alistair and Jim noted the importance of metrics to transparency and improvement.)  Jim also took questions including why to wrap TSP in Scrum.  Reasons: (1) Product owner, and (2) defined "done" at each iteration.  It turns out that TSP came to Adobe, not because of Jim bringing it rather because people at Adobe heard the great TSP stories coming from Intuit and "want sum’dat!"

A first for SEPG, was the inclusion of time between the morning’s keynotes and lunch for very user-group-esque "peer to peer" sessions.  Conference participants self-selected into table-top discussions driven by other attendees, not selected by the conference program.  In fact, attendees put up topics and volunteered to lead them — or put up topics in hopes of someone else showing up to lead and play subject-matter-expert.  To no-one’s surprise, David Anderson signed up for agile and lean discussions.  (David’s in the ruddy color left of center in the image.)  And, again, to no-one’s surprise, there were more people interested in this topic than room at any one table, so the conference logisticians moved the crowd to its own room where, as can be seen in the photo, numbered several dozen people.  Subsequent to this image, more arrived and were standing around the seated area.  One might sense a trend of growing interest in this population for the last few years whenever the terms "CMMI" and "Agile" are put together, eh?  As it turns out, of the several simultaneous peer-to-peer sessions, the two with the most participants were the Agile-related one and the TSP one.

(Well, super insider’s double-hush secret preview scoop of things to come: expect Agile, Lean, and TSP to start showing more prominently both at SEPG and throughout the work being done at SEI.)

David lead Achieving High Maturity with Kanban mini-tutorial.  His talk was mostly about the culture necessary to achieve high maturity and how Kanban can facilitate it that.  But describing it that way makes it sound like it was a commercial for Kanban.  It wasn’t.  It was about culture’s and measurement’s roles in maturity of development, productivity, quality and production management.  How the data drives the actions of the teams and these actions can be demonstrably linked to things that can actually be managed.  One way to summarize is in how he said, that "level 5" results are achievable by setting expectations of level 5 behavior as a matter of culture.  It’s telling that David’s session spanned 2 normal sessions.  People had the opportunity to leave mid-way and go to other sessions.  Despite other session opportunities, there was a net gain of attendees in David’s session.

After that, came me.

The CMMI Guide to the Perplexed.

Well-attended, many friendly faces and most people seemed to enjoy it.  Lots of positive feedback… of course, detractors seldom tell you to your face, do they!  You can get the presentation here.

San Jose, CA. Day started (for me) @ 4:45am PDT (which my body believed to be 7:45am) with a work out, some email and chat, quick breakfast, and a teleconference with a prospective client. I arrived to the conference hall just as Dr. Paul Nielsen, CEO of SEI was introducing the first keynote, Scott Cook co-founder of Intuit Inc. (now chairman of the company’s Executive Committee of the Board).

Impressive start-up story, but more impressive is their use and integration of TSP and Agile (Scrum).

He also told the old story about Chevrolet and Toyota in which Toyota ran a Chevrolet factory in this area using their production system keeping Chevrolet’s UAW employees. Resulting in turning the worst plant in the company into the best Chevy plant in the entire company. Anyway, he probably spent too much time on that story. Unfortunately, too many people in these circles aren’t professionals in process improvement to know that story — which is now part of the process improvement lore.

Though he summarized TPS in an interesting way, saying that it’s a process for rapid experimentation. I can see how he’d come to that conclusion considering the emphasis with TPS on Kaizen. He also spoke about the lack of process improvement in businesses who would desperately need it, like hospitals today in the USA. (I should note that UPMC is an exception in leading the way. Get with it everyone else!)

Jim Bampos, VP of Quality at EMC spoke as the next keynote. Turns out he was a toy tester for Milton Bradley when he was in kindergarten. Spoke about leveraging processes and process improvement to facilitate their Total Customer Experience (“TCE”) program. The way I’d say the same thing — to my clients, not to correct Jim — is that it’s necessary to connect process effort to business values and goals. Nice. Jim was up-front that they have no interest in CMMI appraisals, and he didn’t know the CMMI appraisal lingo, which made the sincerity of their effort that much more obvious. He mentioned that after several months of process improvement effort and measurement, that despite having great data, it still didn’t connect to their “TCE”. Very poignant!

Very refreshing keynote in that he was brutally honest about quality and findings of their investigation into what drives customer experience and loyalty. They take process so seriously that they tie improvement to metrics, goals and bonuses…. FROM THE CEO on down! NOT process compliance or some crap like that, but their actual demonstrable process performance measures tied to money as a function of whether it supports their corporate goals — which are laser-focused on customer experience. EMC is looking to implement all three CMMI constellations. For good measure, he spoke about the fact that they’re using agile practices all over the place.

Who’s “pushing” them to do all this? NO ONE OTHER than themselves. Almost makes me want to work there. Almost.

In all, really great keynotes. Each SEPG conference should be so lucky.

Next up: CMMI or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both! Being led by Mike Konrad. Jeff Dalton, David and I joined Mike on stage. We stood because there weren’t enough seats for the audience and the union wouldn’t allow us to bring any more seats into the room due to capacity concerns. (In fact, a guy stood outside the room to prevent people from coming in. One such person blocked out was Alistair Cockburn, whom I went out to drag in despite the protests of the bouncer dude.) Mike reprised a presentation he’d done elsewhere summarizing the main points of our paper and adding some new material making a case for process discipline in a couple of engineering-related process areas of interest. The slide, here, is an idea David and I intend to “borrow” from, depicting, manifesto style, concepts we value from CMMI compared to other concepts possible from CMMI we value less.

Last for me for the day was an interesting perspective on CMMI and Innovation. Presenters’ positions are that CMM started as something that would help organizations take revolutionary steps in innovative improvements as well as evolutionary steps and that while the model still can support this, use of the model has been far from it. In addition, they discussed innovation as a process and then how CMMI could be enhanced, supplemented, or even “constellationed” into being more proactively in support of innovation. The speakers were very passionate about innovation. Props for that. Need more of it. They also posited that “maturity levels” for organizations using such a model would be superfluous and that what would matter most to anyone pursuing innovation would be business results. While I wholeheartedly endorse the idea of innovation as a pursuit to which processes can be applied, I was left wondering why *must* it be a CMMI? Maybe I’ll be able to tag-up with one of the presenters to ask before week’s out.

San Jose, CA.  I’m at (no surprise) SEI’s annual big deal conference, SEPG-NA.  As might be expected, attendance is way down due to the economy.  SEI had to scale back a lot of the more splashy touches — no-frills tote bag, nixed VIP socials mixers bare bones staff.

I arrived in time to teach a CMMI-SVC Supplement course for the SEI on Sunday — scheduled to coincide with SEPG for the convenience of travel — that evening I shared conversation and a bottle of really nice California Merlot with Alistair Cockburn, Tami Zemel and Steve Masters.  Earlier in the day Alistair listened in on my class from the corridor and over cheese and fruit bluntly reported that the content made his ears bleed.  Unfortunately, he’s right.  Despite the mostly very positive feedback, there’s only so much charisma can do for certain SEI materials.

Alistair challenged me to explain CMMI to him in 5 minutes or less or he’d fall asleep.  I believe I succeeded.  He Tweeted as much at least.  As it turns out, not to either of our surprise, whether using agile terms or traditional terms, if you’re working to improve the experience and situation of "development", you have the same goals and face the same challenges.  With that settled we called it a night and met this morning over breakfast to joke about travel anecdotes and strategize our individual plans for the day.

With other obligations on my plate for this week, this morning I only sat in on half of a half-day tutorial this morning on the excellent topic of The Role of Organizational Culture in Process Improvement.  Rather than a bunch of finger-wagging (which, from other presenters, such a topic title might devolve into), anthropologists, Palma Buttles and Fred Valdez, and process improvement uber-guru Judah Mogilensky gave a very well-informed, thoroughly enjoyable, interactive and insightful tutorial on several very specific attributes of culture that affect how to introduce, address and implement process improvement, and the challenges faced by consultants, appraisers and users alike due to culture.  Concepts on the perception of time, surface or hidden emotion/expression, stated vs. rewarded values, and so on.  During this session, David Anderson arrived.  We commiserated over the registration statistics and what it may imply for other large-scale conferences like Agile2009.

To round-out the day’s sessions I attended Corey Ladas’ mini-tutorial, Launching a Kanban System for Software Engineering.  He put up a slide depicting a "waterfall" life cycle which included a "stabilization" phase-gate to which he said, "I don’t think I’m saying anything anyone doesn’t already know will fail."  Someone in the audience stopped him to ask (with incredulous tone in her voice), "Are you trying to say that this approach doesn’t work?"  <<Snicker.>>

After the tutorial, I headed off to the exhibit area for the "grand opening" of the exhibit hall.  As part of the fanfare, a troupe was hired to march around the exhibit hall in oriental dragon costumes accompanied by drums and cymbals.  It was festive and lively.  Though it would have been more appropriate had they been asked to start things off, lead everyone into the hall, do a circuit around the hall, then be done.  Instead, they continued to perform for a lot longer than needed.  In addition to causing traffic problems (which wasn’t really a huge issue), they made it hard to speak while nearby.  That was an oversight.  After a break, they returned to continue, only playing softer.  Still, their initial display was too long and they didn’t have to come back.  It wasn’t that it was bad, it was merely unnecessary.  As for the exhibit hall… so sad… so many fewer, and each booth featured fewer people.  The student posters, were a refreshing new feature this year.  I was impressed with their efforts, both in terms of research and commitment.  First person I ran into was from, of all places, UMBC.  Yup, home turf.

Afterwards, David Anderson and his gf joined several of us for a wind-down at the Marriott’s concierge lounge.  Well, as I should expect, my increased visibility within SEI and within the CMMI-oriented market has also resulted in never having to sit alone if I didn’t want to.  Even then, I didn’t always succeed in getting long stretches of time on my own.

The third technical note to get started in 2008 is finally published with a cushion of 50 days left in the year!

Yes, my friends, *the* paper we’ve all been waiting for has made it through the gauntlet of reviews and approvals at the SEI (which is, after all, still part of a major research university, CMU, so let’s cut them some slack), and has been released!

This is likely the most fanfare it will get.  It’s just not really their style, or mine, so it’s rather suiting.

I would, however, like to put in appropriate props for my co-authors, Jeff Dalton, David Anderson, Mike Konrad, and Sandy Shrum.  They were a pleasure to work and collaborate with the entire time.  Despite not appearing at the top of the list, Mike and Sandy must own stock in the only thing worth any thing these days: midnight oil.  Thanks to them this paper even got out while the year still reads "2008".

Thanks also goes out to everyone with whom I’ve discussed the content of the paper, reviewed sections, and to my friends in Mt. Crested Butte, CO who provided great ideas back in September 2007.

Writing this entry from Mar del Plata, Argentina, where I’ve finished teaching the Introduction to CMMI Services Supplement earlier today and where the SEPG-LA starts tomorrow, and where I’m keynoting (now) on Thursday, is rather poetic to the whole episode:  Just another tick in the clock of time where I find myself away from home.  Working, teaching, speaking, and again amazed that I’m experiencing all of it.

Today, in the lobby, I met Edward James Olmos.  I’m sure I’ll come up with some way to connect his latest hit to CMMI and Agile.  And, no, the SEI are not Cylons!  Nice try.  Read the paper.

Well, it’s well past my bed time out here.  Busy days coming.

Peace to you.

So I’ve been down to the Agile2007 venue twice this week.

Unfortunately a host of converging factors prevented me from making it a priority to attend.  Leaving me to just lurk a bit on two occasions.  How can I simply lurk without attending?  Well, it’s being held in DC which is just miles down I-95 from Baltimore, my new base of operations since March 2006.

What conspire against my attending include primarily the fact that I will be "out of pocket" (that means away from my usual place of work or sleep) for the better part of 2 of the next 3 weeks. Adding a complete 4th week to that ratio would not be good for my family or my clients.

While I couldn’t attend during working hours, I’d had reason to swing through Monday and Wednesday evenings.  It was nice as I either met, ran into, or was otherwise introduced to a lot of neat folks.  Some whom I’d only corresponded with via email, and others whose works I’ve read.

Several groups and committees are taking advantage of the confluence of personages descending upon the conference to conduct some necessary face-to-face business.  One such committee met on Monday evening after the end of conference sessions, where I participated in a collective contributive effort to forge a document for IEEE.  The purpose of the document is to  facilitate  set expectations  establish relationship patterns … well… you can see that it’s still a bit fuzzy as of close of meeting on Monday.  But the doc has something to do with guiding people who want to acquire agile  software  development  engineering  services, and helping them be aware of what agile followers and buyers of agile services should consider in the transaction.

OK, so, that’s a really convoluted way of saying that it’s just supposed to help communication and understanding between (ostensibly) traditional-development oriented buyers (read: US Federal Government) and what they can expect when wanting to contract with technology developers using agile methods.  But saying that was just not gonna sit well with everyone on the committee.  All of whom were practitioners of Agile in some way and all but me and one other were attending the conference.

Among the IEEE doc crowd (all good people) was Scott Ambler, with whom I’d corresponded before, but never met in person.  He pretty much looks just like his picture.  I was bummed to not have more time chatting with him.  Outside of the group’s facilitator, I had never met or corresponded with any of the other folks, and don’t know much about their exploits.  Of Scott, I’d had occasion to volley on some lists in the past.

After the meeting a few of us were mulling about.  That’s where I saw Ken Pugh gliding by.  I’ve only known Ken for about a year when we met a consulting retreat.  Until then, I’d only been tangentially aware of his work in refactoring, actually called PREfactoring (emphasis mine).   Almost simultaneously, Clementino Mendonca of Microsoft found me and we chatted a bit about MSF for CMMI.  I told him about my fabulously easy experience conducting a "Gap Analysis" for CMMI at a client using the templates, and he insisted I write an experience article about it for him to add to their "learning" repository or somesuch.  Just a few weeks ago, I’d fielded a question on an MSF forum he moderates.  Gotta love timing.

Shortly afterwards I was heading the the direction of the WC when I heard my name being called in Scottish.  It was none other than David Anderson, with whom I’d been texting and Skyping on and off all day to figure out if/how/when we’d get together.  The plan was for later in the week, but we thought it would be nice if we could at least say "hello" while I was there.  Instead, he ushered me into the icebreaker event where I ran into Brian Lyons, CEO of NumberSix Software, of whom I blogged last month.

Wednesday evening was the APLN annual meeting.  I arrived with 30 minutes to spare, which was nice because to get to the meeting room you had to walk through the display area.  Also known as the "trade-show" floor.  I saw Ken Schwaber hanging out with the Scrum Alliance folks.  Though I’m considering becoming one of the only Lead Appraisers to also go through the Certified ScrumMaster training class (example), I didn’t want to interrupt him to just say, hello.  He doesn’t know me from Adam, as far as I know.

NumberSix had the booth closest to the room APLN was using and Brian Lyons decided to rib me about not being at the conference.

At the APLN meeting room I spoke some more with Clementino.  Only this time it was about Jeff Sutherland’s work (info here) with an organization achieving CMMI Maturity Level 5 while also using Scrum for development.  Clementino and I were agreeing about the boon to both camps that such a report could have.  In fact, I’d pointed out that the report had already caught the attention of the SEI and that the Lead Appraiser, Kent Johnson, is well-known and respected at the SEI and has been around CMM/CMMI for a while.  Here we go with timing again!

David Anderson had snuck in and sat behind my field of view and I didn’t know he was there until he spoke up about a topic of discussion.  I later learned that he’d been waiting for me outside in the lobby, concerned that I couldn’t get in to the meeting room because it was in a room in the conference area and I wasn’t properly badged for entry.  I guess all the qualified rent-a-cops were taken by DHS.

At the meeting was Alistair Cockburn, whom I really wanted to meet because he was probably the first Agile name to read my first published article and he said nice things about it.  My wife finds it fun to compare what people look like in person to what they look like in pictures, and even better, what they look like if you’ve never even seen them.  So for her, I note that Alistair is buff and was rather tan, in case anyone was wondering… but he bailed out before I could get a chance to meet him face-to-face.  Though seeing him "in action" was quite a treat.

After the APLN meeting, David and I went out for some DC culture.  The BrickSkeller (Don’t Google it.  Google returns their old, awful, site; don’t go there unless you don’t need your eyes).  I’m glad it wasn’t disappointing, in that despite having not been there in years, the kitchen was still slow but the beer was still plentiful and fabulous!  We both opted for a seasonal summer draught from Dogfish Head Brewery of Delaware that was absolutely perfect!  We munched, sipped and chatted about all things Agile/CMMI/Lean and related topics.  He then invited me to visit with some Microsoft buds (where he worked until about a year ago) who, it turned out, were dining at The Brickskeller’s sister pub, RFD.  Smaller beer selection, closer to the hotel, but nowhere near the character as it’s nestled in the newly revitalized China Town neighborhood (7th and F,G,H, I Streets, NW) of the District.  (As a complete aside, I must note how impressed I am with how effective and successful the re-vitalization of that area has worked!)

Many of these folks were also at the APLN meeting, but I didn’t know who they were at that time.  In fact, one is the current president of the organization.  One topic of conversation was a set of planning poker cards I picked up at one of the booths.  It was really pleasant to meet them and talk about agile ideas with a fun (and good-looking) group of people.  I’ve really gotta say a public "thank you" to David for is hospitality and generosity.  Not to mention his ideas.  He convinced me to write two books, like yesterday, and offered to co-author another with me.  What was that I was saying about timing?  Now, I just need to go find some more!

And well, that’s it.  I can’t exactly call it a "report" from Agile2007, but I hope to rectify that next year.  At least next year there won’t be a similar event like there is this year to get in my way of attending.