It's official... (and a little value for your time)
Entirely for legal, insurance (read:liability) reasons, I've established a direct Partner relationship between Entinex and the SEI.
It means I can put this on stuff I do:
It's true that being directly listed in the SEI's Partner directory will have some marketing benefit since people look there for CMMI resources, but the truth is I get plenty of inquiries from other stuff I do.
It will be interesting to see if/how being listed as a Partner changes anything.
So... about Agile+CMMI.
Here's something to think about:
Many of us are impressed when we see the "before" and "after" photos of someone who got into shape. Whether they lost weight and got thin and buff or they pumped serious iron and got big and buff, we're equally impressed. The more the transformation the more impressive. Usually.
We're often reminded or compelled to ask how much time elapsed in between the "before" and "after" and more easily driven to ask "how" the person did it.
Since we're so easily impressed by these photos, and, we so readily accept that a process took place in order for the person to get from "before" to "after", why do people (read: many developers and appraisers) have such a difficult time recognizing that if we do a "before" and "after" of development products, that what happened in-between was a p r o c e s s ?
Is there anything wrong with that sort of evidence? Could the before and after of an affected work item/product collectively be a sufficient artifact?
The answers are: NO. There's NOTHING wrong with that. And, YES, that can be adequate evidence.
The question, then, is whether what caused the before and the after was on purpose, whether it can be defined, or managed, expected, or even predicted. That would make it evidence of process improvement. Not just that it "happened". That a process happened is just a process. That the process happened on purpose, and the extent to which it is defined, or managed, expected, or even predicted, makes it contribute to process improvement.
Labels: Before and After, SEI Partner
posted by Hillel @ 15:25
3 Comments
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3 Comments:
Thank you for your nice blog and post.
I am very interested in Agile CMMI. I want to minimze direct evidences for small businesses I am working for.
Could you please elaborate on this point and provide us with typical examples?
Your ideas helps us a lot, so keep posting.
Ahmed, I believe you mean to say that you want to minimize non-value-added work in producing non-value-added evidence. You certainly don't want to minimize direct evidence!
It is entirely possible, on the other hand, that someone has led you to believe that Direct Evidence = "Documentation". For, that would be a very serious shame.
A "before" and "after" example could be what any of your work products looked like (a version) before some process, and an update to that version after the process had an affect. A common instance of this is anywhere there is a "review" of the item(s) and a resulting change to the item because of the review.
For another example: often, people get hung up in the need to "plan" an activity. Certainly, planning to perform a process is part of "managing" your processes, but the idea of a "plan" is too frequently interpreted as the need for a physical "plan" document to be created for each "planned" activity. On the other hand, a "plan" can be a collection of items. As long as those items exist due to purposeful and not accidental or incidental actions. Such a collection of items can be (a) your procedure that lists the tasks, (b) your project plan that accounts for and sequences everything that takes time, (c) your resource assignments, where every week your organization prioritizes who works on what, and so on. Collectively, these items encompass all the elements of planning without creating additional "plans".
A last example, for people who insist on resisting any form of record-keeping, is to photograph or video/audio record meetings. Photos/scans of the white board are often very fast but still useful reminders of meeting activities without being ridiculous about either not keeping records or about keeping records.
Exactly, I meant the tons of documents that are not adding any value. In some company that planned to be certified CMMI level 2, with just 3 small projects each is about 6 months durations, I found more than 1 Giga of documents that half of them is useless.
Your are examples are helpful, thank you.
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