Vishwas Mahajan and Rakesh Singh Delivered Successful Presentation at CMMI Capability Conference 2019. Vishwas sharing his reflections…‘Capability Counts 2019’ held at Reston, Washington DC, was my second time as a participant at CMMI Institute hosted conference, but first time as a speaker!
Whizible, an ideal data platform for CMMI® process excellence aspirants.
Last year when we decided to revive Whizible sales and marketing, we identified the potential use cases where Whizible would be most suited.
Historically, software organizations that were pursuing or planning to pursue CMMI appraisals and certifications were good use cases for implementing Whizible.
Whizible provided a complete underlying data platform connecting all the project activities with processes and facilitating capturing real-time leaf level data, used for dynamic metric generation. This full functionality of Whizible PSA tool solved a key pain area for companies pursuing CMMI process excellence.
Whizible has created a process module, which allows for different lifecycles of projects to be modelled using that and for the project managers to inherit the desired lifecycle to make it easy for them to roll out projects.
With that context, in 2018, I attended the capability counts conference, pretty much at the last minute with no background or preparation, to see what’s happening.
Transition of CMMI from SEI to CMMI Institute, a part of ISACA
The CMMI as an organization itself had changed in the interim. Some of the things that had changed in CMMI were that from the SEI, the Software Engineering Institute (of Carnegie Mellon University), it had transitioned to CMMI Institute and now part of ISACA.
CMMI has strong brand recognition and a record of success in the government and enterprise segments, while ISACA excels in helping practitioners, enterprises and governments with Information Security
With agile methodologies coming in, CMMI needed to quickly adapt to the newer ways of doing things.
What inspired me to speak at the CMMI Capability Counts 2019?
When I arrived at the conference last year in 2018, I saw that this CMMI was still alive and based on what I heard, it was growing. We, also, had revamped our PSA solution Whizible, and I believed that we could help CMMI process excellence.
It was with that context that I came back, and when the call for presentations was made, I sent an abstract about using data and the ability to create the data for generating metrics as a topic.
This was the abstract that I sent
“ROI Is A Marathon – Not A Sprint. And Help Is On The Way”
Conference Track: Leveraging Tools for Greater Capability The Abstract“Deploying CMMI is intended to elevate business performance and provide insights for baselining and optimizing key organizational capabilities. This is a marathon – not a sprint.
To stem the decline of initial momentum generated at the appraisal time, the deployment, when complemented with comprehensive data capture and automation of workflows and metrics generation, offers the best chance of institutionalization.
This minimizes the need for continued investment of manual efforts, and senior management can visually ‘see’ the business performance resulting from CMMI.
This session will discuss an integrated approach to combine process and business performance using technology to achieve ROI.”
What made me select this topic for my presentation?
I thought that a lot of CMMI discussions that happened, focussed more on the technology aspect and less on the business aspect and my inspiration were to see how we can help organizations generate a good ROI (Return on Investment) from a business perspective.
We surveyed CMMI entities using SurveyMonkey and LinkedIn
The survey started in December 2018. We tried reaching out CMMI practitioners and organizations using the CMMI process framework with the help of SurveyMonkey and LinkedIn.
The survey objective was to understand the correlation between real-time data gathering and metrics generation and the level of organizational process improvement achieved using CMMI methodologies.
We got an overwhelming response to this survey.
Involvement of my friend/ collaboration partner as a co-presenter
While the topic was taking shape, I also managed to talk to my friend Rakesh Singh, who himself is a CMMI lead appraiser and our collaboration partner, to add the perspectives of CMMI process framework to the presentation and he readily agreed.
After submitting the abstract and getting it approved by the CMMI committee, we worked together to create the initial presentation, and I must say that the CMMI moderators were of immense help and it went through a few iterations before it got finalized.
