Archive for the ‘P-CMM’ Category

Free at last!

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

This morning, SEI Partners and Sponsored Individuals received the letter, below, from Dr. Paul Nielsen, Director & CEO of SEI.

THIS IS A GOOD THING.
Watch the video for my explanation why it is.

******
To All Partners and Sponsored Individuals:

The following important announcement is sent on behalf of Dr. Paul Nielsen, Director and CEO.

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) have mutually decided to move the CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) and the PCMM (People Capability Maturity Model ) out of the SEI and into an independent business unit of CMU. We believe this new unit may also be a natural transition path for other SEI developed technologies, methods and practices as they mature.

The SEI is a Federally Funded Research & Development Center (FFRDC) established in 1984 to provide technical leadership and innovation through research and development to advance the practice of software engineering and technology in support of DoD needs. DoD acknowledges the significant contributions that CMMI has made to Defense programs and the software engineering community, in general. Recognizing the maturity of CMMI and PCMM, SEI and DoD have agreed that the maturity of these technologies make this an appropriate time for the SEI, as a science and technology based FFRDC, to concentrate on newer research.

Carnegie Mellon University is excited about establishing this new business unit to serve the global software engineering community even better–to make adoption, evolution and maintenance of the models more flexible for government and commercial organizations, to be more creative with our partners and other organizations in creating business relationships, and to face the market more proactively.

As we plan and implement this transition, one key objective is to cause as little disruption to our licensees and partners as possible; therefore, we expect the transition to be seamless, with continuity among key participants. You can expect:

  • A renewed, single-minded commitment to the product
  • A transition that underscores the central role of our licensees and partners
  • Continuing investments to expand the scope and evolution of the models

We intend to transition these technologies and evolve the business model in conjunction with our partners and the Partner Advisory Board. Current details of the transition can be found at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/partners/CMMI-Transition-2012.

Additionally, we will be hosting interactive webcasts on 25 May at 9:00-10:00am EDT and 30 May at 5:00-6:00pm EDT. To register for the webcasts Friday, May 25: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/649898953 or Register Here and Wednesday, May 30: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/690424856 or Register Here. Look for more face to face information sessions at SEPG-EU.

Best regards,
Paul

SEPG North America – Day 3

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

The Spectacular Crash and Burn (mine)

My morning talk on Top 10 Clues You’re Probably Not Doing Engineering was a spectacular bust!  Oh, but the lessons I learned!

In the immediate after-action analysis I realized what had happened.  (Any other excuses I might’ve made at the time to the contrary.)  Here’s what actually happened (at least the most likely scenario):

I was tired.

On the evening (read: early morning) when I was working on the final final of the presentation, instead of merging the presentation’s pictures with the slides right there, I chose to procrastinate that task to the next day (or later).  Welllllll, being as tired as I was, by the morning I’d forgotten that I had not completed that task.

OK, so that explains why my slides didn’t have their pictures.  So, moving on, my next idea was to just present without the pictures.  That idea was met by the audience with a resounding moan of disappointment.  (I guess a lot of folks were at prior presentations and they liked my pictures.)  So, off I navigated to grab the source files from their folder.  The folder where all the pictures were supposed to be.  And they weren’t there.  WTF?  How do you/ I explain that!?!

I was tired.

So, back to the night (read: early morning) of the great non-merging event.  What must’ve happened (at least the most likely scenario) is that some files were saved to some folder other than the one with all the source materials, and I was completely oblivious to it.  How?  Of course!  I was too tired to notice.

Always quick to find the silver lining, my tremendously inspiring wife, Jeanne, (she’s a veritable silver-lining-finder) pointed out, "You’ve got great material for future presentations!  Just talk about how you can’t take care of business if you don’t take care of yourself!" 

Dangit!

Caught.  Red-handed.  Pants down.  Wedgie.

The same applies to your team, work group and your company.  If you don’t take care of them, they can’t take care of the business.  That’s a People CMM presentation if I ever heard one!

The rest of my day was spent licking my wounds. 

Thanks to everyone who said nice things about it nonetheless.

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Field notes from SEPG-NA 2009 – Monday

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

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.

kanban_ladas 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.

image 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.