December 10th, 2008 · CMMI
Tags:agile·CMMI·process
I was reading Henry Schneider’s PPQC blog today and found an interesting question and answer on setting up a criterion checklist for Decision Analysis and Resolution (DAR). The question was about how to set up a spreadsheet to handle several weighted criteria so that the total represented 100% of an organizational need. Henry did a lovely job of answering the question, and offered good advice on limiting the number of criteria so that the scores weren’t too close and to minimize confusion.
In that context, it all seemed reasonable, but I caught myself wondering why I should limit my criteria to two or three just so I can get more spread to clarify my rankings of the DAR alternatives. As I noodled on the issue, I realized that the underlying premise is not helpful: that we started with 100% of need, and then have to parse out those percentages to arrive at the total, and also to create separation of rankings.
I’d prefer to start with the alternatives themselves. [Read more →]
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Tags:CMMI·criterion checklist·DAR·decision matrix·mutiple attributes·PPQC·spreadsheet
October 15th, 2008 · CMMI
I was at the New Jersey Process Symposium yesterday to give a talk on models I use in my consulting work.
The keynote was given my Ed Yourdon, whom I’ hadn’t seen in a while, at least since he talked to the NY CitiSpin sometime last year. He was about to give his Web 2.0 talk (updated), but decided at the last minute to trash it and talk about more current issues.
How about the financial crisis and its downstream effects on technical professionals for a start? [Read more →]
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Tags:Ed Yourdon·financial crisis·New Jersey Process Symposium·technical professionals
CMMI is often thought of as a large investment–in time, in money, and in human resources. That’s true if one buys the “whole banana.” The “whole banana” often pays off, but it doesn’t have to cost a lot to get started.
Consider this. Identify one or two things that are troubling you your project. Go look in the CMMI and identify the practices that relate to those. Fix them. Track how it worked. Adjust as needed. Repeat.
CMMI is about practices, good practices, proven practices. Only when you take the whole banana is it about processes, management, policies, directions, and so forth. if every journey starts with a single step, every model starts with a single practice. Start small, then build from there. It’s just another way of saying “Think globally, act locally.”
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Tags:CMMI·implementation
I received an email the other day from the SEI about participating in a workshop to gather the current knowledge on multiple-model improvement. This, I’m sure, came as a result of two Partner Network Advisory Board surveys last year that reported that the SEI was way behind the curve and needed to bring CMMI in line with other improvement models that were already in implementation. By that, the community meant ITIL, ISO (any of a number of standards), eSCM (SP and CL), and others, including implementation approaches like Six Sigma and Lean.
The intent of the survey was to get the SEI to identify the overlaps among the various components of the CMMI Suite (DEV, ACQ, SVC) and existing models. The point, as I took it from the myriad of pages of comments, was that the others are already in progress, we may not need another one, but we could sure use some clear links between the SEI product and the others in the field.
Seems that as I was chatting with Tim Kasse the other day, he mentioned that he gave the SEI an awful lot of material in ITIL-CMMI linkages already. Or do I misremember?
[Read more →]
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Tags:CMMI·CobIT·eSCM·implementation approaches·improvement models·iso 9001·ITIL·outsourcing arrangement·six sigma
I took some conflict of interest training the other day. It came from the SEI as part of their Ethics and Compliance Program. The material was apparently based on the Professional Code of Conduct a team of us built with the community a few years ago, but it seemed more targeted to SEI employees than to authorized instructors and lead appraisers in general.
First of all, I should say that the Code of Conduct team agonized long and hard over the use of the word “ethics.” We determined that ethics referred more to value systems than to behaviors, although the latter might stem from the former. We thought it was probably not a good idea to dictate a set of common values to the Partner Community, largely because value systems are context and culturally tied. In addition, value systems are neither observable nor enforceable.
So we avoided the word and tried to characterize guidelines [Read more →]
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Tags:appraisers·compliance program·conflict of interest·ethics·professional behaviors·professional code of conduct·SEI·training
I am constantly puzzled by the language used in the news. Why is it that terrorist groups that perform heinous acts, such as beheading, are allowed to “claim responsibility” for their acts. It’s as though they had actually committed responsible acts, rather than completely irresponsible ones.
On the other hand, why is it that the major players in our own political theater spend so much time “blaming” each other for simple differences of opinion or perspective? Since when does having a different viewpoint constitute something that’s truly blameworthy?
Folks, we’ve got this all backwards. [Read more →]
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Tags:language·perspective·terrorist groups·terrorist organization·viewpoint
