UNDERSTANDING CMMI PRACTICES

About 25 professionals from various cos. in Chennai attended the program at Cognizant office (8.30 am to 10.30 am) on 14th December 2007. Meeting started with presentation by Mr. Karthik Padmanabhan, Lead Appraiser of Trimentus explaining on

• Latest anxiety of CMM compliance and actual impacts and benefits
• How CMMI outcome is more objective and deeper than usage of scorecards and tools to set and monitor the performance.
• It is indeed an Alarming Issues for all practitioners.

It was indeed a valuable experience to learn THOUGHT LEADERSHIP amongst group of peers who are equally concerned on QA front.

1. Many clients have complained to the SEI that they are suffering on project defects and delays despite having contracted with SEI-CMMI level 4 and 5 organizations.
2. That compelled SEI to do reevaluation if the outcome is effective or not in practice. That showed that though model is perfectly good and valid, interpretation of many requirements have been incorrect.
3. That has forced them to now come out with HIGH MATURITY Lead Appraisers certification to ensure those HMLA appraisers are themselves good enough for stringency and thus their appraisals may give better effectiveness.
4. Challenge has been always
   a. Do we know the difference between Actuals Vs Planned
   b. Do we know what corrective action to take
5. But with High Maturity issues cropping up, outcome must be to assess
   a. Will you be successful
   b. What if you were to do something else
6. In other words emphasis is more on What Actual Practice We Do, rather than just compliance with the Book or QMS or CMM levels.
7. SEI themselves have now taken upon themselves to reevaluate certain projects and compliant cos. to ensure that PURPOSE is REALIZED. Lot of training programs for users in the industry as well as for Lead Appraisers is being conducted.
8. In the new version CMMI 1.2, model has been retained as nothing was found wrong, but the emphasis has been incorporated on L4 and L5. It has become more intense. L2 and L3 remain same as they provide important foundation.
9. Key issues these days are setting core objectives which will have two directions ( eventually making it as STRATEGY)
   i. Define Objectives with success outcome criteria
   ii. Define Processes called for to achieve that Objective with
   a. Baseline mapping of each process ( Process Performance baselines)
   b. Identification of dependency/relationship between baselines which gives rise to model generation
10. L5 is not L4 plus Root Cause Analysis plus a pilot with measurement.

One senior participant asked that despite working in various MNCs, he has never found so strict compliance to the practice expected with process. The speaker then said that it was why perhaps SEI is concerned and launched version 1.2 to control the outcome. Another participant mentioned that could be due to cultural or political or top management issues. Finally questions came across the audience as to why we Indians and Indian Cos fail to ACTUALLY show the benefit of L4 and L5 in real terms. Will that seriousness come with Rupee going to Rs 30 or Rs 50?

Talking about Agile model, the speaker mentioned that he knows only about SCRUM, which works well with L5.

Enough heat was generated that SEI-CMMI compliance is now going to be ruthless and not that easy as had been taken by Industry.

Source: blog.nasscom.in