Everything you thought you knew about CMMI is (probably) wrong.

What most people (80/20) seem to "know" about CMMI and the SCAMPI appraisal method comes from what people learned and how they used CMM and CMMI in the early adoption phase.

However, instead of innovating and using engineering to create appropriate processes, they just reused old and often poorly-fitting processes and approaches to situations they never dreamed of in the 1980s.

Even people with positive experiences with CMM/CMMI tell us that we challenge what they once believed to be “true” of CMMI … but that they’re relieved because many always felt that what they thought was “true” made little sense.

Recommend:

• Entinex CMMI Crash Course™ (Slides, Description)
• CMMI FAQ

Next week: 

Your people with prior CMM/CMMI experience are probably worse than worthless, they'll probably cause you to fail.

Writer gets ink...

I got some ink in today's BBJ. 

Thanks to the DoD's Base Realignment and Closure initiative, Maryland is getting a lot of new Federal jobs and opportunities.  Naturally, I wanted companies looking to capitalize on this to know that if they want to play in the "development" space, that they'd need to know about CMMI.  Readers of this space may be surprised to learn that even in Federal-funding-rich Maryland, not everyone developing technical products (including software) knows that CMMI exists, let alone knows what to do about it.

Originally, I submitted an article about the importance of knowing about CMMI for any company looking to enter this market space.  The folks at the BBJ couldn't wrap their heads around it and asked for something more basic.  This is the result.

At least they published my gmail account as shown.  That way some savvy readers will see the hint.

Here's a print-out of the full article.