Archive for the ‘Engineering’ Category

CMMI Institute to Help Companies around the World Elevate Organizational Performance

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013

Delivers Process Improvement Frameworks with Proven Business Results

Entinex is a proud partner of the CMMI Institute. We have been using CMMI and its predecessors to help elevate performance for over 16 years and have seen the value of the models to deliver measurable business results for our clients. We look forward to working with the CMMI Institute to extend the reach of the CMMI frameworks to enable individuals and organizations to reach their goals.

Our Founder, CEO, and Performance Jedi, Hillel Glazer continues to be the pathfinder for bringing CMMI, lean and agile practices together. He furthers his involvement by playing a critical role in helping the CMMI Institute formulate its strategies and carry out several important projects, including providing important input to the success of their SEPG conferences and foundational material for CMMI’s product suite in the agile market.

(Also, see this article on CMMI in SD Times.)

November 20, 2013 09:00 AM Eastern Standard Time
PITTSBURGH–The CMMI Institute announced today its strategy to extend the reach of the CMMI model to enable businesses of every size in every industry to elevate performance and to provide tools that equip CMMI practitioners to begin and to grow their journey with CMMI.

The CMMI Institute, established by Carnegie Mellon University, is home to the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), a gold standard of excellence in software and systems development. The Institute will continue to help this market to solve business problems while advancing the use of the model to new industry sectors around the world.

CMMI is used by some of the world’s most admired and innovative organizations, including Samsung, Accenture, Proctor & Gamble, and Siemens. CMMI adoption has been a powerful differentiator for businesses and a catalyst for economic growth in regions that invest in its broad adoption.

“To compete in the global market, leaders must build organizations that can consistently deliver quality and value in products and services,” said Kirk Botula, CEO of CMMI Institute. “The CMMI Institute enables organizations committed to excellence to achieve measurable results in the facets of their business that matter most to their goals. CMMI provides a framework of practices that can help organizations to identify and address key challenges to improve performance and the bottom line. We all know work is not the way it is supposed to be—CMMI helps make it better.”

The CMMI model was developed at Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI) through collaboration of government, industry, and academia to help the Department of Defense and its contractors like Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing improve their software engineering capabilities. Widely trusted as a mark of reliability, many organizations require CMMI adoption as a pre-requisite for bidding on contracts.

Thousands of companies across multiple industry sectors in 94 countries have adopted its practices to elevate performance and have been appraised for capability and maturity using CMMI methods. The CMMI product suite includes product development, service delivery, procurement, and staff management—making it a worthwhile investment for any business. Carnegie Mellon University founded the CMMI Institute in order extend the benefits of CMMI beyond software and systems engineering to any product or service company regardless of size or industry.

KK Raman, Partner Business Excellence, KPMG India says, "Carnegie Mellon is a pioneer in developing best practices and transitioning them to industry, and this is reflected in the global adoption of the CMMI. KPMG is one of the premier organizations around the world with over a decade long partnership with CMU. We help use the CMMI Institute product suite—frameworks, training, certifications, and appraisal methods—to achieve organizational goals by enhancing processes."

Extending the Benefits of CMMI

The global adoption of CMMI is supported through a vast network of partners who guide organizations in the successful adoption of the CMMI models. As part of today’s news, CMMI Institute is advancing the practice of CMMI with an online self-assessment tool as well as new professional credentials for practitioners.

  • CMMI Self-Assessment Tool: A new online tool that allows organizations to begin their journey of elevating performance as well as to diagnose their existing implementation by assessing the current state of their organization. By answering a brief set of questions, users will gain critical insights that provide an analysis of an organization’s strengths and weaknesses as well as solutions to improve the capability of their organization.
  • CMMI Associate and CMMI Professional Certification: The CMMI Institute will be offering certifications to help individuals translate their experience with CMMI into professional development opportunities. CMMI Associate and CMMI Professional Certifications will provide confirmation of an individual’s knowledge of basic and advanced concepts in CMMI and demonstrate to current and prospective employers they are dedicated to excellence and have valuable skills to help elevate organizational performance.

"As a professional who uses CMMI daily in my work, I am committed to advancing my understanding of the models and to helping my clients and my organization position themselves to successfully meet their goals. The practitioner credentials will not only provide a clear path for my growth, it will also help me to communicate and validate my skills to my clients as well as my organization," said Capri Dye of Hubbert Systems Consulting, Inc.

The CMMI Self-Assessment Tool and Practitioner Certifications will be available in early 2014.

About CMMI Institute

The CMMI Institute, a subsidiary of Carnegie Mellon University, is dedicated to elevating organizational performance through best-in-class solutions to real-world challenges. The Institute is the home of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) for Development, Services, and Acquisition; and the People Capability Maturity Model which are process improvement models that create high-performance, high-maturity cultures. The models are used in thousands of organizations worldwide to deliver business results that serve as differentiators in the global market.

About Entinex

Entinex, Inc. is an aerospace engineering firm bringing the same skills and critical thinking used every day in aerospace to solve complex business problems. The creative, technical, and audacious characteristics of aerospace are leveraged to create elegant, inspiring, and break-through solutions to real business challenges to companies throughout the world in many fields and industries. The company’s approaches see through hairy, complex business problems with x-ray-vision-like clarity and accuracy and designs, explains and implements solutions with amazingly powerful yet easy-to-apply simplicity.

Posted in Business Benefit, CMMI, Culture of Excellence, Engineering, Executives, Getting Started, High Performance, Improvement, Leadership, Performance, Process Improvement, Productivity, business case, competitiveness, strategy, value | Comments Off

SEPG North America 2013: Why You Want to Be There!

Thursday, August 22nd, 2013

Why Do You Want to Be There?
This year, the conference is significantly re-orienting itself towards END USERS. Previous SEPG conferences had a lot of useful information, especially for experienced change agents and consultants in the field.

This year, the focus is on up-and-coming disciplines, established success strategies, and most importantly, direct business performance benefit of using CMMI. In fact, what we’ve seen over the years is that CMMI is working extremely well with other forms of improvement as well as with existing defined service delivery and product development approaches — whether agile, lean, traditional, customer-focused, innovation-focused, or some combination.

CMMI provides a specific framework that is both a way to focus attention on specific needs while also benchmarking progress. Instead of flailing around trying to find where to put improvement energies, or waiting for a long-term traditional approach of process exploration and decomposition, CMMI takes a lot of the guesswork out by leveraging decades of experience and laying out very specific goals to seek to improve performance.

CMMI users have reported their productivity to increase magnitudes of order, costs drop in double digits, and their ability to cut through thick process jungles more quickly than being left alone to their own devices.

Yes, I’m speaking and presenting at SEPG 2013, but that’s the least relevant reason to attend. Come because you want to see what others are doing to marry CMMI with existing (or new to you) concepts; come because you want to hear from other end-users what they’re doing with CMMI to improve performance. And, most of all, come because you want to get and stay ahead of your competitors who aren’t using CMMI nearly as effectively as you will after attending.

SEPG North America: The CMMI Conference is coming soon, but there is still time to register.

This year’s conference program will include content perfect for you if you are:

  • Beginning to implement–or considering implementation of—CMMI
  • Seeking resources and best practices for integrating CMMI and Agile practices
  • Interested in taking your process improvement game up a level
  • A fan of rivers, boats, bridges or baseball !

Check out the conference agenda here: http://sepgconference.org/sepg-north-america-agenda and when you register, enter the promotional code "Entinex" to save $100 on your fee. (Or just click this link and the discount will be applied for you.)

Book before September 1st to get a discount on your hotel room, as well.

Get the details on the website (http://sepgconference.org) and email sepg@cmmiinstitute.com with any questions.

Posted in Agile, Agile+CMMI, CMM, CMMI for Services, Customer Satisfaction, Development, Discipline, Efficiency, Engineering, Goals, High Performance, Improvement, Innovation, Kanban, Maturity, Performance, SEPG, SEPG Conference, SEPG North America, Services, agile SCAMPI, lean, measurement, operations, value | Comments Off

Forget CMMI!

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

This is probably the most important blog entry I’ve ever posted.

The video is the longest video I’ve ever posted on the blog, and for that reason, I’ll keep the text content to a minimum. 

Here’s why you should watch the video:  CMMI may be entirely wrong for you, and you may not know it!

The video explains an epically crucial reality about CMMI that many agile (and other) teams are not aware of, leading them unknowingly down a path of self-defeat and damage.  All of which could be avoided with this one super-critical piece of knowledge.

You’ll thank me later.

Backstory:

The lure of seemingly limitless opportunities can be quite strong, obviously.  And, especially in tough economic times, succumbing to that lure can cause even the best of businesses to act unwisely.  Such is the lure of CMMI ratings.

Well, anything that’s very alluring can cause unwise behavior, I suppose.  Whether it’s as apparently harmless as indulging in a luscious dessert, spending money on unnecessary luxuries, or any of equally limitless opportunities to make bad choices, doing what we want instead of doing what’s right shows up even when working with CMMI.

This blog is full of examples of such bad CMMI choices, but there’s one bad choice I haven’t mentioned much about.  That’s the choice to even try to use CMMI.

When working with a knowledgeable, concerned, trustworthy CMMI consultant, an organization should be steered away from CMMI when their circumstance doesn’t align well with model-based improvement using CMMI.  In some cases, it may be a matter of steering towards the right CMMI constellation (e.g., for Development, or, for Services).  However, just as whether or not CMMI is right for an organization ought to be discovered before too much energy is put into it, so should the decision about a particular maturity level within the constellation.

No CMMI constellation should be attempted if/when the organization doesn’t control the work that it does.  Namely, that the work it does is controlled by another organization, such as a customer.  Or, put the other way, CMMI should only be used if/when the processes used by the people doing the work are controlled by the same organization using CMMI to improve them.

At Maturity Level 2 (ML2), almost any type of work can use the practices in that level to improve its performance and to demonstrate that the practices are in place.  However, at Maturity Level 3 (ML3), you have to be doing the type of work in the particular constellation in order to be able to use the practices in it.  If you’re not doing that type of work, the practices will be irrelevant.  Attempting to use the practices when there’s no such work being done will only cause the practices to get in the way and add nothing but frustration.

In particular, if you’re not doing work that involves structured engineering analysis, CMMI for Development at ML3 will be truly unwieldy.

Adding practices for work you’re not doing is an example of the bad behavior many organization exhibit when they’re chasing a level rating rather than hot on the trail of performance improvements.  It’s these sorts of behaviors that are somehow rationalized as being beneficial when, in fact, they are unequivocally, diametrically, and everything but beneficial.  They are a colossal waste of time and money and detrimental to morale and productivity.

You really need carve out about 11 minutes to watch the video.

Posted in CMMI, CMMI for Services, Development, Engineering, Improvement, Level-Chasing, Maturity Level, Performance, ratings | Comments Off