The Future of CMMI

This presentation will address the strategic direction of the CMMI Project, including both the changes in V1.2 as well as the future CMMI release of new “constellations,” such as “CMMI-Services” and “CMMI-Acquisition.” A brief summary of current status information (training, appraisals, and available materials) will be included to set the stage for CMMI-based discussions with the audience.

How to make business improvement work in a large organisation

Its not about CMMI or Six Sigma its all about Business Improvement. Grant Holdom is Business Improvement Director in one of the largest civilian IT projects will discuss how tools such as CMMI and Six Sigma are not ends in themselves but are simply important techniques for leveraging more effective Business Performance. Grant will describe how the correct positioning of these approaches is critical to their acceptance within a fast moving goal focussed organisation and how it is critical to keep flexible in the approach and lever external drivers in building an internal consensus that makes continued Business Improvement a practical reality that retains its relevance to the changing needs of the organisation.

CMMI V1.2 The good, the bad and the ugly

This talk will survey recent changes to the CMMI and explain the advantages of the Capability Maturity Model Integration CMMI© v 1.2. It will also discuss difficult sections of the new model and address the real cost benefits of the CMMI and how it can be successfully implemented through CMMI assessments (SCAMPIs).

CMMI an Introduction

This presentation provides a high level non-technical overview of the CMMI focussing on its pedigree, what it is, how it is used and its role within process improvement. The presentation will briefly describe the CMMI structure and tease out some of the key model elements. It will also provide an overview of CMMI Appraisals and discuss their role within a process improvement initiative.

Lessons learned on the journey to ML4

Delegates will be taken on a six year process improvement journey leading to CMMI Level 4. GTECH is a global technology company operating in over 40 countries, providing software, networks, and professional services. This presentation will share GTECH’s experience of adapting the CMMI® framework for use in a real world environment. It will candidly describe the challenges faced, mistakes made, and solutions adopted to successfully implement change within multicultural teams located across six continents. It will provide examples of significant and measurable benefits accrued by remaining focused on business objectives.

Fighting international terrorism with process improvement

On September 11 2001 the world opened its eyes to the threat of international terrorism, and almost four years later on July 7 2005 that threat arrived on Britain’s own shores with the London bombings. As one of the government intelligence agencies responsible for protecting the nation from terrorist attacks GCHQ suddenly found itself with an increasing need to do more – both by making best use of existing resources and also being able to sensibly capitalise on the extra money that was made available by government in response to the attacks.

The challenge of making the most effective use of resources without stifling innovation or affecting the versatility required in the ever-changing telecommunications industry for an organisation with the biggest configuration management system in Europe is no mean feat. The department was already working hard to meet these objectives by “improveing the people” through a radical programme of education of all managers, a standard project management discipline (PRINCE II) had been in place for some time, and even the software areas were starting to standardise on the Rational Unified Process.

With a challenge to continue to improve, the organisation decided to use CMMI to focus that work. In some areas there has been great success, with centralised support for PRINCE II and RUP and a growing acceptance of CMMI which has shown improvements in estimation, measurement, customer satisfaction and even in product defect rates. In others areas, especially those areas who traditionally have been valued most for their reactive nature and who those who hadn’t benefited from standard processes in the past the journey has been much slower. This session will explore the pitfalls and opportunities of making change using CMMI in a big technical organisation.

Managing Institutionalization

Actively monitoring process institutionalization at Maturity or Capability Level 2 is often a difficult aspect of being successfully appraised at that level. At maturity or capability level 3, support is provided by the Organizational Process Focus area (OPF), and at higher levels by other process areas including Organizational Innovation and Deployment. Some organizations choose to introduce elements of OPF and Organizational Process Definition precisely to try and address this difficulty. Even so, in relatively immature organizations the concept of institutionalization is difficult to adopt and even more difficult to plan, monitor and control.

A checklist based approach is introduced for helping to monitor the institutionalization of individual processes within an area of the organization. Defined by Lamri in collaboration with a strategic client and used extensively within that organization to actively plan, monitor, control and report progress towards institutionalization the approach is simple to implement and to use. At the same time it provides a very granular approach to the control of institutionalization allowing specific processes (or process artefacts) to be monitored and controlled within specific, focused areas of the organization. The individual elements of the checklist are objectively based and simple to answer – requiring only yes/no responses.

The checklist can easily be customized to the needs of specific organizational units. The checklist is supported by tools which facilitate the reporting of progress at a fine level of detail within each organizational unit. Other reporting tools maintain snapshots of the overall picture across reporting periods, allowing progress to be checked visually and quantitatively. The use of the tool by the client organization is illustrated.

Bridging the gap between CMMI and ITIL

This presentation defines and describes Application Life Cycle Management (ALM) up to and including supporting an application in Production service. Based on actual implementation experience it explores the reasons for introducing good process discipline to ALM, particularly in respect of new technologies such as SOA and Java applications. The presentation will position CMMI within the overall context of ALM and will discuss the importance of its contribution to the discipline of application delivery. We will then describe how product produced in accordance with CMMI guidance can be delivered into a Service environment managed under ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) Best Practices (ISO 20000) for Production service. Finally the presentation will look at how to implement and automate process management across the ALM to enable CMMI maturity and ITIL certification to be achieved and maintained.

Global Deployment of CMMI Appraisal Activities

This presentation provides an overview of the key elements that an organisation should consider when seeking to deploy a CMMI programme across geographic boundaries within a single organisation. The material includes perspectives on establishing an effective improvement programme that will successfully enable an organisation's strategic intent through to the more operational matters associated with planning an effective CMMI journey. Insights are designed to be both practical and help the audience think through some of the complexities of deploying an effective CMMI programme of activity.

Driving change across 32,000 people

Sustaining superior business growth requires IT investment to be controlled and focused. CMMI drives behaviour change that provides for this required improvement however the CMMI model is not a natural first choice for large organisations. CMMI can be successfully exploited to transform the software engineering capability of a large organisation by using industrialisation as a unifying theme. Using CMMI to drive industrialised capability transformation brings some new challenges to be overcome and some key operational pitfalls that must be avoided. Success holds out the promise of realising huge financial and professional benefits.

10 Myths about generic practices

"Institutionalisation is an important concept in process improvement. When mentioned in the generic goal and generic practice descriptions, institutionalisation implies that the process is ingrained in the way work is performed and there is commitment and consistency to performing the process.” – Guidelines for Process Integration and Product Improvement, Second Edition.

Despite this assertion that the generic goals and practices are there to help ingrain process improvement and drive commitment and consistency, many organisations have difficulty implementing this element of the CMMI model, sometimes even going through the motions simply to satisfy an appraisal.

“There are only 10 things you need to do to satisfy the Generic Goal 2.” “I’ve written some policy statements, I just need to get the CIO to sign them off and we’re done.” “We just don’t have the time to train everybody in all the process to satisfy Generic Practice 2.5”.

Neil will address these and other “myths” in this session, aimed primarily at those who are just starting out on their CMMI journey. Rather than being an inconvenience en-route to a achieving a maturity level, Neil will explain how the generic practices can be used as enablers for increasing capability and for ensuring that process improvements become embedded in the organisation’s way of working.

CMMI a view from the 5th floor

How does the UK perform in CMMI terms? Using CMMI as a measure of the software and systems engineering capability of a country, how does the UK figure. Richard will review the latest SEI data on appraisals, and predict what this may mean for the future, by looking at trends across different countries and industry sectors. Richard will also look at the way that CMMI has grown from a largely defence background into most commercial IT sectors.

Why is CMMI important? Richard will explain why Aerosystems International adopted CMMI, and look at what it has done for us. Since 2002, AeI has been actively pursuing process improvement using CMMI, becoming the first UK company to achieve Level 4, and, at the end of 2006, becoming the first Level 5 Organisation in the UK.

What is life like at Level 5. Level 5 is just the start…At this point you have all the tools necessary to keep improving performance – now it get interesting. We have found the key characteristic is cultural, and Richard will review some of the organisational behaviour at Level 5. For those already engaged in CMMI, Richard will also look at how our higher maturity has affected the CMMI appraisal process. Richard will also touch on how we work with less mature organisations, both internal and external.

Aerosystems International is a wholly owned subsidiary of BAE Systems, and provides high integrity software and systems to the aerospace and transport markets. We have laboratories in UK, and USA, and offices in Canada, and Australia.

The CMMI and RUP: Practical applications to modern software development

This presentation discusses the advantages of using CMMI in conjunction with RUP to provide practical benefits; CMMI gives a broad range of criteria to guide process improvement to establish business value, whilst RUP provides a range of best practices to support the CMMI criteria. Practical examples are presented both in terms of areas of application and Rational tool support. Modern trends such as agile development and Model Driven Architecture(MDA)* are discussed. Finally, an overview is given of how various Rational solutions can also be used to support the tailoring of processes, their deployment and management.

*MDA is a trademark of the Object Management Group

Getting a Lean, Six Sigma and CMMI approach to business improvement

There are many myths and misconceptions held about the use of Lean and Six Sigma with CMMI. Traditionally CMMI based improvements looked upon Six Sigma experts as people to turn to deliver or fine tune Measurement & Analysis processes and to develop higher maturity level process areas.

The succesful use of Lean, Six Sigma and CMMI by various industries is challenging the traditional mantra of being able to use one method only. There is of course no simple answer to the question: which approach and why as the answer almost certainly is influenced by the characteristics of the organisation undergoing change.

Adam will give an understanding Lean and Six Sigma and show how, with CMMI they can be used as complimentary set of improvement methods to provide a lower risk, faster approach with both real and hypothetical examples.

Achieving and Maintaining CMMi Level 5 (The Journey)

Applabs is a global IT services Company specializing in quality management, testing and certification solutions. As experts in software quality assurance, Applabs is the preferred partner for third-party validation for many of the world’s largest organizations. As a company achieving and maintaining rapid growth, AppLabs believed in the process improvement principles and embraced various process/quality models and standards. We took the Capability Maturity Model (CMMi) as our flagship model.

Achieving CMMi level 5 has been a challenging and thought provoking journey. This presentation hopes to demonstrate the ups and downs of this achivement and the benefits it has brought to our organisation. In the first instance, we will explain why we chose CMMi and what benefits we perceived we would achieve through its adoption. Key reasons to choose CMMi were primarily drawn from our commitment to quality service and customer satisfaction. In addition to that, our intent was to build a strong measurement framework around our service delivery. We will also talk about our process journey in the pre CMMi and post CMMi stagesand how it evolved and embraced other quality standards like ISO and BS7799.

The presentation will also discuss the kind of issues we had to face while integrating other quality standards to CMMi based quality management system. Given the fact that the CMMi Framework is developed for the entire product development lifecycle, we talk about the challenges faced by the Company in adopting and interpreting the framework for purely testing projects. We will also spend some time discussing about the timelines and milestones in this journey. ROI is most important in any process improvement journey. We will discuss the benefits we derived out of CMMi in the areas of products, processes and people. Some of the benefits were direct and some of them were subjective and applied to the way we do business.

Finally we would like to explain our approach to sustain the process rigor involved in CMMi and conclude the topic with our thoughts on the future of CMMi and its impact on the IT services industry.

CMMI-ACQ

TBC