Challenges with Implementing the CMMI in Small Settings

At the 2009 North American SEPG Conference in San Jose last week, I was the first presenter in the Small Settings track. This was a well attended presentation and I wanted to share it on my blog with those of you who were not able to attend this year. I also wrote a companion article published by ExecutiveBrief that you can read at Small Business and the CMMI: Sink or Swim.

Challenges with Implementing the CMMI in Small Settings

View more presentations from Henry Schneider.

2009 SEPG Conference - Day 2

Yesterday the conference kicked off into full swing with the two Keynote Speakers. The first speaker was Scott Cook, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board, Intuit Inc. Scott talked about the key process factors that have led to Intuit's success: Team Software Process (TSP), Agile, and the Toyota Production System (TPS). Intuit has realized quite some important gains by using these different process improvement methods. At the conclusion of his talk, he presented an entirely different issue that is ripe for process improvement. Scott showed a slide of various causes of death each year in the US and he asked us what we thought were the top three causes. It turns out that Heart Disease and Cancer are the top two, but the third cause is Hospital-Related. Scott claimed that there are 160,000 Hospital-Related deaths each year, which is the equivalent of a fully loaded 747 crashing and killing all on-board once a day. And the majority of these deaths can be attributed to people and process problems: not enough resources available, wrong diagnoses made, wrong surgical operations performed, incorrect medication delivered, etc. So Intuit is helping the Stanford Medical Center use TPS, based on Intuit's experience, to address these people and process issues and they are already seeing benefit.

The second speaker was Jim Bampos, Vice President, Information & Quality Management, EM Corporation. Jim spoke about the process improvement challenges faced by a primarily hardware company that now has a software component. And the added complexity of EMC continually acquiring new businesses and integrating them into their corporate culture. Jim recommended Marcus Buckingham's book Put Your Strengths to Work.

2009 SEPG Conference

The 2009 SEPG Conference kicked off yesterday with a day of tutorials. This year I had the pleasure of moderating the Risk Management tutorials. There were two half-day tutorials. The morning session was "New Directions in Risk: A Success-Oriented Approach" by Audrey Dorofee, a senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute. This was a very interesting tutorial presenting a pratical approach to managing risks based on risk drivers as opposed to focusing on the Top Ten List of Risks. There were also three exercises providing the attendees hands-on experience using this new, practical, and easy to understand technique. The presentation can be downloaded from www.sei.cmu.edu/msce/presentations.html

The afternoon session was "Avoid V-Nosediving or Spiraling Out of Control with the Incremental Commitment Model" by Barry Boehm, TRW professor of software engineering and director of the Center for Systems and Software Engineering at the University of Southern California and the originater of the Spiral Model. Barry spoke to the audience about the Incremental Commitment Model (ICM) and how it builds on the strengths of phased models (such as the V-model and the Spiral Model) and incorporates a risk-driven approach. There was a lot of information packed into the 99 slides presented over the two 1 1/2 hour sessions for this tutorial. It will take a lot of studying to understand and implement this new approach. Apparently, the software engineering students at the University of Southern California are using the ICM and there is growing evidence of its value and benefit. You can read more about the ICM at http://csse.usc.edu/ and look for Technical Report 2009-500.

Upcoming Events of Interest

This Spring has a number of events of interest to readers of the PPQC Blog.

In March 2009, I will be presenting a paper titled Challenges with Implementing the CMMI in Small Settings at the 2009 SEPG North America Conference in San Jose, CA. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/sepgna/2009/

I will be presenting Session ID 2075 on Thursday morning, March 26, 2009. If you will be attending the Conference, please make plans to attend my presentation.


If you can't make it to San Jose in March, perhaps you will be able to attend the CMMI Made Practical conference in London April 28 - 29, 2009. I will be making a presentation titled A Practical Approach to Defining Useful Measures on April 29. http://www.cmminews.com/


And lastly, if all else fails, I will be teaching a public offering the SEI's Introduction to CMMI class, plus PPQC's Overview of Requirements Management in Stuttgart, Germany May 18 - 21, 2009. If you need to take the Introduction to CMMI class to help you implement the model in your organization or if you will be on an appraisal team, here is your opportunity to take the class in Germany's sixth largest city while enjoying its many hills, valleys, and parks in the evening. You can register for this class at PPQC's German partner KT-BITS' web site.

http://www.kt-bits.net/ If you attend one of these events, please be sure to introduce yourself. I certainly look forward to meeting you at one of these events.