Monday, March 28, 2016

CMMI Certification - what is it and how do I get it?

Hey, CMMI Appraiser, my boss asked me to look into a CMMI Certification. What is it and how do I get it? ~ Neil S.

Hey, Neil, what a great question!

The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is more popular than ever. Given the increasing rate at which the Model is being adopted, sometimes we find ourselves so deep in conversations about organizational performance innovation and software process improvement that we forget that there are new people coming onboard every day. They hear their bosses tell them to find out about something called “CMMI certification” and go to Google for clues. So, welcome, Neil. The party’s just getting started!


That’s right, I said party! As a certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser who has worked in the industry for many years, I’ve come to think of the CMMI as one big party, and everyone is invited!

Now, to answer your question, to begin with, the CMMI Institute discourages the phrase "CMMI certification" and instead likes us to refer to a company as having "achieved CMMI Level 2" (or Level 3, Level 4, Level 5). Note that organizations achieve CMMI, people do not. 

Many people use to the phrase "CMMI certification," so you often see it in the metatags of sites (like this one, Broadsword's, and the CMMI Institute's). But the truth is, you "achieve" a level of CMMI by building, deploying, and managing a process within your engineering and project management organizations that reflects the best-practices identified in the process areas of the CMMI model. Once institutionalization is apparent, you bring in a CMMI Institute-authorized SCAMPI Lead Appraiser to lead you through a SCAMPI Appraisal.

Depending on the appraisal type you select, it will result in either a gap analysis or a set of formal findings that identify your company as having achieved (or not achieved) CMMI Level 2, CMMI Level 3, Level 4 or Level 5.

So, while the phrase “CMMI certification” is common on Web sites and conversations throughout the industry, a better question is as follows: “How do we achieve a CMMI level rating?”

Let me repeat for clarity. You achieve a CMMI Rating ("a level") by building, deploying, and managing a process architecture within your engineering and project management organizations and you use the best practices identified in the process areas of the CMMI model to make it better. That's it! Once institutionalization is apparent, you can then engage with a CMMI Institute-certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser to lead you through a SCAMPI Appraisal. For many organizations, it makes sense to work with a CMMI consultant to help you decide when it is best to appraise your organization. There are many certified lead appraiser who can help you as a consultant as well.

But keep in mind: The CMMI is not about getting a CMMI certificate or achieving a CMMI Maturity Level. As I said above, the CMMI is more like a party, an ongoing celebration, a model to help guide you in your quest for becoming a great company … and you’re invited!

For more information, please feel free to visit the Broadsword web site, or check out our webinar, "All about CMMI!"

Webinar: "All about CMMI!"
Date/Time: April 18, 2016 @ noon EDT
Registration: Sign up here.

See you on the webinar!

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

How do we scale our agile approach to dealing with risk?

Hey, CMMI Appraiser – we’re a CMMI Level 3 organization that is trying to scale our value of having an agile way of dealing with risk. Where can we get information that will help support this goal? ~ Dan I.

Hey, Dan,

How cool that you’re taking an agile approach to risk management! Lately I'm seeing more and more CMMI adopters that are learning to take advantage of agile methods for a lighter, leaner approach to solving business problems incrementally and iteratively. For more information about scaling your value of having an agile way of dealing with risk across the enterprise, I recommend signing up for our webinar, “Managing Project Risk.”

One of the key take-aways from the webinar is the strategy of using what we call “CMMI questions” to scale your approach to addressing risk. CMMI questions come directly from the Model, which guides us to ask questions that will help us learn more about how we work.

For example, specific to this value, risk management, the CMMI guides us to gain more knowledge about the way we deal with risk. So the first CMMI question we need to ask, as we roll this out, is the following:

“What are the methods and techniques that we’re going to use to support the value of having an agile way of dealing with risk?”

It starts with our values. We want to approach risk management iteratively and incrementally. We want to get those issues of risk when they’re young, and deal with them in small pieces. We want to prioritize them and get them out of the way. Asking CMMI questions is a great way to do this.

I invite you to learn more strategies, tips and techniques for scaling your value of having an agile way of dealing with risk, by signing up for our webinar:

Webinar: “Everything You Need to Know: Managing Project Risk!”
Date/Time: Friday, March 25, 2016 @ noon EDT
Registration: Sign up here.

See you on the webinar!

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information.

Monday, March 21, 2016

Back by Popular Demand! Our “Process Quality Assurance” webinar

Hey, CMMI Appraiser,

One of the QA people in another division saw a webinar you hosted a few months ago that offered strategies, tips and techniques for improving the company’s quality program using CMMI. I hear it was very useful. Will this webinar air again, and if so, how can we get our people signed up? ~ Alan M.


Alan,

Great to hear someone from your company got value from the webinar! We invest a tremendous amount of time sharing our passion for performance innovation in the form of conference speeches, live seminars, blog posts, podcasts, videos, ebooks, articles, white papers and webinars, so it's always gratifying to get positive feedback. And your question comes at a good time – we’re providing the “Process Quality Assurance” webinar again this week!


Webinar: Everything You Need to Know about Process Quality Assurance!
Date/Time: March 23 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Registration: Click here

What’s the webinar about?


On this webinar, CMMI L2 and L3 companies learn an engineering strategy that helps them emphasize quality over compliance, establish a structure for collecting improvement data, align the processes with the people who are using them. The upshot? You’ll know what it takes to drive higher quality and get greater results from your quality program.

Who is the webinar for?

The “Process Quality Assurance” webinar is designed to help CMMI L2 and L3 businesses that are …
  • Living in fear of the auditing process
  • Improperly focused on tracking incidences of non-compliance
  • Failing to get any better
What’s in it for YOU?

The “Process Quality Assurance” webinar helps businesses that want to …
  • Transform your quality program into something that actually helps the company improve
  • Gain visibility on how work in your company gets done
  • Understand what tools and standards your people really want to be successful
  • Create an environment in which quality resources are valuable partners on projects
  • Reduce the number of risks on your projects and forget the number of non-compliances game 
  • Build better products than your competitors who have a lot of chaos, late and over budget projects, too many meetings and unhappy customers
... and much more!

Take the first step to having a quality assurance program that works for you, not against you. Sign up for “Process Quality Assurance” today!

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author, and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information.


Friday, March 11, 2016

Is CMMI just one giant headache?

Hey, CMMI Appraiser, you know what I don’t get? Why people like you are convincing people like my boss that we should look at adopting CMMI, even though, our customers are not requiring that we adopt it. Who needs this headache? Seriously! ~ Tom B.

Tom, you know what I don’t get?

Even in this age of instant, worldwide communications and knowledge-sharing, I don't get why some really smart engineering and software professionals operate as though they have not heard the news that CMMI is 100% about solving business problems.

News flash, Tom!  CMMI doesn’t cause headaches. It cures them!

Look, let's not raise our voices.  I'm not trying to convince you or your boss to do anything. You seem to be laboring under the misconception that the CMMI is this heavy, command and control, document-centric cauldron of hard, dreary work and pure nonsense that tells you how to do your job.

C'mon, man! CMMI has none of that! CMMI does not tell you HOW to do anything. CMMI doesn't “require” anything. CMMI is simply a tool designed to help you solve business problems, including:

  • Change and improve requirements churn and volatility, so that you can spend less time and money on requirements
  • Be on-time and on-budget
  • Motivate your staff and make them better at what they do
  • Understand and deal with risk before it hurts you
  • Avoid having too many meetings, unhappy customers and unpredictable projects

And CMMI can do this whether you choose to be agile, Waterfall, or use any other set of methods.

That's probably why your boss is interested in CMMI, Tom.  Why not get ahead of the curve? Educate yourself on process improvement, performance innovation and CMMI by signing up for our FREE webinar, "All about CMMI” on Monday, March 14.

Click here to sign up.

Hope to see you on the Webinar!

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!


Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author, and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information.

Thursday, March 10, 2016

A single program for CMMI, ISO and A-SPICE -- how does that work?

Hey, CMMI Appraiser. Our team has been reading your CMMI ebooks, and we have a question.  As a CMMI Level 3 supplier to the auto industry, we want to know more about aligning CMMI, ISO/TS and Auto SPICE into a single program for performance innovation. How does that work? ~ John M.

Hey, John,

Thanks for reading my CMMI eBooks!  I really love sharing my passion for performance innovation in conference speeches, live seminars, webinars, blog posts, podcasts, videos, ebooks, articles, white papers and more.  It's so cool that you're finding the ebooks useful!

You know, like you, a lot of companies that are CMMI ML2 or ML3 have been asking about integrating CMMI, ISO 9001 and A-SPICE into a single program for performance innovation.  So many that we created a webinar expressly for this purpose.  On "Integrating CMMI, ISO 9001 and A-SPICE," you'll learn to combine these frameworks and methods innovatively for greater results.


Webinar: Integrating CMMI, ISO 9001 and A-SPICE
Time: Friday, March 11 @ 12-1PM EST
Register: Click here

Why participate in the webinar?  You’ll learn to address practical, real world business problems, such as …

  • How to streamline and strengthen the way you so business
  • How to gain visibility into every aspect of the business
  • How to eliminate duplication and overlap in reporting
  • How to attract and retain top employees
  • How to prevent the loss of business and intellectual capital to competitors


Take the first step to aligning ISO/TS, CMMI and Auto SPICE and having better quality products and greater customer satisfaction. Sign up for “Multi-Model Improvement” today!

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author, and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information.


Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Our 8th eBook Is Now Available on Amazon: “Just the FAQs”!

Dear Readers,

We’re excited to announce the publication of our 8th agileCMMI eBook: “Just the FAQs, Second Edition!


In “Just The FAQs, Second Edition” my good friend Pat O’Toole and I join forces to share a series of short stories from different perspectives about CMMI, process improvement, and Agile development. We address common misconceptions, myths, and fundamental misunderstandings that persist with the software and engineering professions. And we have a good time doing it!

Click here for your copy of "Just the FAQs, Second Edition".

“Just the FAQs, Second Edition” is a compendium of stories written in 2015 that have been distributed individually as part of a series, right here on Ask the CMMI Appraiser. The ALL NEW stories are now available in eBook format as a collection. To purchase for 99 cents on Amazon, click here.

What you’ll find in the book:
  • How do the generic practices make us better?
  • What is training capability?
  • How do we develop good PPQA habits?
  • How can we REALLY know how things are going?
  • ... And much, much more!
Get the facts!  "Just the FAQs"!

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

© Copyright 2016: Process Assessment, Consulting & Training and Broadsword Solutions

“Just the FAQs, Second Edition” is written/edited by Pat O’Toole of PACT and Jeff Dalton of Broadsword. Please contact the authors at pact.otoole@att.net and jeff@broadswordsolutions.com to suggest enhancements to their answers, or to provide an alternative response to the question posed. New questions are always welcomed!