Sorry, folks, no fun (or not-so-fun as you may prefer) video today.  Not even any pictures I took at SEPG.  In fact, as far as today went, I don’t have much to report from the sessions.

Again, I missed the plenary session.  This time on account of a phone meeting with a client in another time zone.  So, my first session to attend was the other of my two collaborative efforts with Judah Mogilensky on SCAMPI Evidence from Agile Projects. As anything with Judah in it, it went rather nicely.  Many generous bits of feedback.  I felt really good about my role, and Judah was his usual incomparable self.

My friend and colleague, Eileen Forrester of the SEI was kind enough to give me some supremely powerful feedback.  I am, and will be, grateful for it.  I was then roped into shop talk about CMMI for Services in advance of the 2nd half of the orientation workshop I’m helping her with.  Thus, my missing out on my buddy, Jeff Dalton’s, excellent (so I’m told from many reports) job with Encapsulated Process Objects.

One point made to me later by another of the few “agile-friendly” lead appraisers, Neil Potter, about a bit of content in the presentation does require some follow-up.  In the presentation we short-cutted the details on a discussion regarding the potential design aspects of test-driven development with an engineering design.  I should say that TDD is NOT the same as a design, but that depending on how TDD is planned and performed, it can include design-like attributes which could accomplish design expectations in the engineering process areas of CMMI-DEV.  So don’t anyone out there go around blabbing some “Hillel said TDD is Design!” crap.  Mm’K?

After lunch, my job was to keep people from falling asleep with a session on Love and Marriage: CMMI and Agile Need Each Other.  From the response, I think it went went rather well.  I, personally, was quite pleased with how it came off from a “talk per slide” metric.  A good friend, Tami Zemel, later admitted that she “takes back” her earlier criticism of Monday’s presentation.  She said it had too many words and didn’t believe me when I told her why.  She complemented not only the picture-centricity of today’s pitch but also the delivery, style, and content.  That was very generous, thank you.

From then to the end of the day, I spent scheming, strategizing, shmoozing, and networking with too many people to mention.  (No offense.)  A client who came to the conference (who never holds back and only inflates the truth when it’s funny to do so) got very serious when a prospect I’d recently met off-the-cuff asked whether he’d recommend me.  I won’t repeat his answer because it really was just crazy nice.  Today’s interesting photo is in his honor.  (And also because my boys love transportation.)

The last “session” was a Peer 2 Peer double-header on the topic I mentioned on Monday which I co-created with Michele Moss.  She and I are also on the SEPG Conference Program Committee.  We used the feedback and other data from the Peer 2 Peer as input to a retrospective on this year’s conference, which will be used for strategies for next year’s conference in Portland, OR.

You can also read an entry I gave to the SEI for their official blog about my impressions of this year’s conference-goers.

Dinner conversation back at the hotel with Michele was back on the subject of our Peer 2 Peer session.  Net result: We single-handedly wrote the 1-3-5 year plan for all SEPG’s.  Or at least we think so. 

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.