I’ve been delivering this class I’ve been calling the CMMI Crash Course™ (What the SEI won’t teach you) for several years.

For reasons I’ve as yet not taken the time to figure out, I’d never advertised it, never had a web page on Entinex.com for it, and only really made it public at the NDIA CMMI conference last year.

Well, my Chief Executive Genie (responsible for marketing research and homeland operations… a.k.a. my wife Jeanne), pointed out that not hello.World’ing the course was a great disservice to the industry.

She pointed out that if part of the Entinex corporate mission (and my personal quest) was to better educate folks about CMMI, and that this education was necessary to help more organizations understand how to adopt CMMI, and that all this was just prerequisites for eliminating the gap (perceived or real) between CMMI and Agile… well… people should know about it!

Until now, other than presenting at the aforementioned conference, my only deliveries of the Crash Course™ have been to prospects and clients.

SO…

Now you know. I’ve got this Crash Course thing I do. It’s pretty decent. Teaches a whole bunch of stuff in a short time (4 hours). Conservatively, it could otherwise take over US$30k, about 4 weeks time over several years to gain what I’ve condensed into half a day of not-so-boring stuff.

I’ve had SEI folks sit in and they loved it. See… even though I say "What the SEI Won’t Teach You" it’s not that they don’t, really… it’s that they just do it in a very specific way that… well… doesn’t connect with lots of people on the things they care about. That’s just what happens when you’ve got a VERY large audience to satisfy. It’s also symptomatic of having to toe a very fine but deep line on what they can/can’t say.

Really… of course the SEI teaches this stuff… how else would I get it? (OK, unfair question… I’m a CMMI geek… I’d probably get it some way.)

Regardless… the AgileCMMI point to this is simply that training really does need to account for the needs of the participants, must be relevant to their projects and processes and must be timely so as to make a positive difference in decision-making. All-too-often I encounter perfunctory "process" training that has a worse effect than being bad. It foments cynicism and dissent for process improvement where the organization’s only goal is painfully clear: prove you had training or the appraisal won’t look good.

More people should know the content of the Crash Course™. It would make their CMMI (and probably Agile) lives easier.

If interested, I’ll send you last-year’s slides. (This year’s are way better.)
[Yes, that was a shameless plug.]
I hope to be presenting this year’s version at the NDIA conference again.
If you visit Entinex.com, you’ll also read about my Crash Course™ plans for 2008.