Seminar 2014 - Comparing Agile-Scrum and CMMI: How They Can Work Together

Overview: Scrum is a pre-defined development lifecycle based on Agile principles. Agile methodologies promote a project-management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, and a leadership philosophy using teamwork, self-organization and accountability. CMMI is a collection of practices that organizations (software, hardware and IT) can adopt to improve their performance. The CMMI comes with two main views (representations), Staged and Continuous. Staged shows all of the Process Areas (groups of related practices) in the form of a road map, allowing organizations to focus on basic improvements before attempting advanced topics. The Continuous representation has the same content but allows for any topic (Process Area) to be selected à la carte.
In the webinar we show how Scrum can implement half of the CMMI practices of Level 2 with little modification and how to add Level 3 practices to an existing Scrum implementation.
Why should you attend: If you are a software engineer or IT professional, your group has very likely shown a strong interest in reducing costs, improving quality and productivity. Your group might also have looked at various pre-packaged frameworks, such as Agile (e.g., Scrum and Extreme Programming), CMMI and Six Sigma. At first glance, each of these frameworks might look at odds with each other, making it difficult to use two or more. This typically occurs because much of the information shared regarding these frameworks is from un-researched opinions and failure stories, rather than understanding the specifics of each framework. Each framework can be implemented successfully depending on how much care is placed on its implementation. In this session, CMMI and Scrum are compared since they are two of the most commonly used frameworks, and ones that groups struggle with when using them together.
Areas Covered in the Session:
Definition of Scrum and CMMI
CMMI Maturity Level 2 and Scrum comparison
Requirements Management
Project Planning
Project Monitoring and Control
Measurement and Analysis
How about the other components of Level 2?
Configuration Management
Product and Process Quality Assurance
Supplier Agreement Management
Generic Goal 2
Adding Level 3 Management and Engineering Practices to an existing Scrum implementation
Requirements / backlog
Requirements elicitation skills
Organizing complicated requirements information (e.g., use case template)
Requirements analysis skills
Release planning, sprint planning and daily standups
Planning using company defined best practices and tailoring guidelines
Using organizational historical data for estimation
Identifying dependencies and stakeholders for coordination, and comprehend this information into a master schedule or an overall project plan
Managing the project with key stakeholders using thresholds to trigger corrective action (such as schedule and effort deviation metrics)
Risk management
Sprint composition
Varying the time within a sprint for requirements, design, coding and testing
How about the other components of Level 3?
Organizational Process Focus
Organizational Process Definition
Organizational Training
Decision Analysis and Resolution
Generic Goal 3 (i.e., using an organization-wide and tailored process with measurements and lessons learned)
Who Will Benefit:
Senior managers wanting to use Scrum and make progress using CMMI
Project or program managers leading teams using Scrum and CMMI
Scrum masters
Internal company Project Management Office (PMO) leaders and members
Internal process improvement coaches tasked with improving the organization’s cost, schedule, quality performance and want to seamlessly implement Scrum and CMMI.
Speaker Profile:
Neil Potter is co-founder of The Process Group, a company formed in 1990 that consults on process improvement, CMMI, Scrum, software engineering and project management. He has 28 years of experience in software and process engineering. Neil is a CMMI-Institute certified lead appraiser for SCAMPI appraisals, Intro to CMMI instructor (development and services), Six Sigma Greenbelt and Certified Scrum Master. He has a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Essex (UK) and is the co-author of Making Process Improvement Work - A Concise Action Guide for Software Managers and Practitioners, Addison-Wesley (2002), and Making Process Improvement Work for Service Organizations, Addison-Wesley (2012). The Process Group consults to software, IT, systems and hardware organizations.