Having earlier fallen in love with a small Company’s wiki (see blog here) its time to explore one of the challenges in implementing CMMI and process improvement in general for small organisations. But first I want to be crystal clear that I’m defining small in terms of staff numbers. Other, less useful, definitions for process improvement use revenue or other financial measures.
Process Improvement
Archived Posts from this Category
March 22, 2011
CMMI and Small Organisations – The Resource Challenge
Posted by Andrew Brettle under CMMI, CMMI-DEV, Process Improvement1 Comment
March 15, 2011
Apples, Oranges and Non-Sequiters
Posted by David Piper under Agile, CMMI, Process Improvement, programme management, project managementLeave a Comment
Lamri have recently had sight of a spreadsheet form Capers Jones that purports to analyze the total cost of ownership of a standardised application built using different types of “software development methodologies”. It makes for very interesting reading and presents some very surprising results. At first sight, anyway.
March 14, 2011
CMMI SCAMPI v1.3 Introduces More Rigorous Sampling
Posted by neilgrover under CMMI, CMMI-ACQ, CMMI-DEV, CMMI-SVC, Process ImprovementLeave a Comment
As a lead appraiser, I was recently sent a draft of the upcoming version 1.3 of the SCAMPI appraisal method. Normally this would hardly generate much excitement outside the small community who earn their living from conducting appraisals, but this release includes at least one change that looks likely have a significant impact on organisations seeking a CMMI rating.
February 23, 2011
CMMI and Defence Acquisition – its time.
Posted by Graham Dick under CMMI, CMMI-ACQ, CMMI-DEV, CMMI-SVC, Process Improvement, programme management, project managementLeave a Comment
Ouch – another uncompromising report from the Commons Public Accounts Committee – this time aimed at MOD procurement. I appreciate that of course this is an insanely complex high pressured environment that really does play for big stakes – however given that situation how can not being the best of the best be an option? Maybe now is the time to learn from the US DOD and start to apply CMMI as part of the answer to evolving to a robustly more capable DE&S?
The Public Accounts Committee report in question – “The 23rd Report – The Major Projects Report 2010″ can be downloaded here.
CMMI made Practical 2011, held on the 12th and 13th April 2011 has some 70% of speakers from real end user organisations discussing how they have used CMMI to demonstrably increase their capability.
Find out how the US DOD invests in structured capability improvement with Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute.
February 14, 2011
Why is it hard to use Lean in an IT Development environment?
Posted by Graham Dick under CMMI, Lean, Process Improvement1 Comment
Lets have a look at Lean ….. It’s origins are manufacturing, the Toyota Production System (this gives a clue, it was not designed with the challenges of IT Development in mind). What are the defining features of this environment?
February 10, 2011
Who says the successful implementation of Government Policy is NOT critically dependent on software?
Posted by Graham Dick under CMMI, Process ImprovementLeave a Comment
I was browsing the other day and came across the report by the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts into the implementation of the new National Insurance and PAYE Service (NPS) by the HMRC. The report can be found here. The report is quite damning, another complex large Government IT project and the seeming inability of big government to institutionalise lessons to be learned and best practice.
February 4, 2011
A change of approach?
Posted by Andrew Griffiths under Conference, Process ImprovementLeave a Comment
For those of you who don’t know me, I have a positive outlook which is tinged with healthy cynicism. Indeed my cynicism increases exponentially where government IT programmes are concerned but today I had a glimmer of hope! (more…)
February 2, 2011
Don’t underestimate the transformation
Posted by Andrew Griffiths under Change Management, CMMI, Process Improvement1 Comment
While listening to the radio the other day, Bill Gates was asked about how it made him feel that people were using technology as a method for rallying political support in the Middle East. I had hoped for an interesting answer but he disappointed. It got me thinking about how technology is transforming everything, even the business of regime change. (more…)
January 26, 2011
How I fell in love with a wiki
Posted by Andrew Brettle under Change Management, CMMI, CMMI-DEV, Process Improvement1 Comment
I’ve seen wiki’s used before in organisations but never really recognised their elegance and beauty as an asset library tool until I was recently assigned to help an organisation achieve CMMI maturity level 2 for its 16-strong development team. Hammers, nuts(!) and plenty of pain came to mind when I started to think about how a small team would realise CMMI. The company, Hornbill Technologies are the development organisation within a larger group (Hornbill), and for their part they focus on developing enabling technologies for use by the wider company, they turned out to be a revelation and a revolution in my own view of Wiki’s.
January 24, 2011
Process Improvement in the Bedroom …
Posted by Graham Dick under Change Management, CMMI, CMMI-DEV, Process ImprovementLeave a Comment
We’ve been doing some work for an organisation – one that achieved CMMI Level 3 in the past. They wished to re-appraise and understandably thought “how hard can that be”?
