Archive for the ‘SEPG North America’ Category

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.

SEPG North America – Day 3

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

The Spectacular Crash and Burn (mine)

My morning talk on Top 10 Clues You’re Probably Not Doing Engineering was a spectacular bust!  Oh, but the lessons I learned!

In the immediate after-action analysis I realized what had happened.  (Any other excuses I might’ve made at the time to the contrary.)  Here’s what actually happened (at least the most likely scenario):

I was tired.

On the evening (read: early morning) when I was working on the final final of the presentation, instead of merging the presentation’s pictures with the slides right there, I chose to procrastinate that task to the next day (or later).  Welllllll, being as tired as I was, by the morning I’d forgotten that I had not completed that task.

OK, so that explains why my slides didn’t have their pictures.  So, moving on, my next idea was to just present without the pictures.  That idea was met by the audience with a resounding moan of disappointment.  (I guess a lot of folks were at prior presentations and they liked my pictures.)  So, off I navigated to grab the source files from their folder.  The folder where all the pictures were supposed to be.  And they weren’t there.  WTF?  How do you/ I explain that!?!

I was tired.

So, back to the night (read: early morning) of the great non-merging event.  What must’ve happened (at least the most likely scenario) is that some files were saved to some folder other than the one with all the source materials, and I was completely oblivious to it.  How?  Of course!  I was too tired to notice.

Always quick to find the silver lining, my tremendously inspiring wife, Jeanne, (she’s a veritable silver-lining-finder) pointed out, "You’ve got great material for future presentations!  Just talk about how you can’t take care of business if you don’t take care of yourself!" 

Dangit!

Caught.  Red-handed.  Pants down.  Wedgie.

The same applies to your team, work group and your company.  If you don’t take care of them, they can’t take care of the business.  That’s a People CMM presentation if I ever heard one!

The rest of my day was spent licking my wounds. 

Thanks to everyone who said nice things about it nonetheless.

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