Over the years ‘interested parties’ have asked me the following questions: Why do we need detailed project plans? Why do we need detailed cost break-downs? A basis of estimate?  What’s that?  Do I really need one? How do I get my customers to pay for those Project Management costs? Rather than offering a lot of consultant type wisdom, I thought you might find some recent news articles a bit more informative and...

SEI Partners Acknowledged for their Years of Service The SEI Partner Network hosted its annual meeting and luncheon in Portland Oregon last week. During a luncheon on Wednesday 23 March 2011, SEI Partner Network Manager Lisa Masciantonio and SEI Director and CEO Paul D. Nielsen acknowledged SEI Partners for their service and commitment. During this luncheon, the SEI recognized PEP for having been an SEI Partner since ‘the...

I think everyone knows that both CMMI and Six Sigma involve process design/ redesign. (For more background and community involvement in Business Process Modeling Notation you might want to check this BPMN forum out.) You may also feel, as I do, that one greatest challenges faced by process professionals involves developing effective process designs and simulating those designs prior to implementation. The ability to try a process out...

As I noted earlier, CMMI and Six Sigma offer differing approaches to improvement endeavors. Immediately below I have included my earlier definition for “Approaches”. Approaches CMMI is designed to provide a “what to do guide” or “road-map” on a per discipline basis. Six Sigma primarily provides techniques and tools for measuring tracking and validating improvement efforts. Again to quote Investopia on Six...

Given that CMMI high maturity level and six sigma organizations typically use statistics packages in assisting them to manage and adjust business trends and flows, I thought our readership might find these links to open source stats packages to be of interest. N.B.: Minitab and SPSS, perhaps the pre-eminent software packages in this arena, are both highly functional, broadly used and extremely expensive; both are also biased to the windows...

As I mentioned in my earlier posting, both the CMMI and Six Sigma grew out of “essentially” separate industries.  The CMMI is most heavily rooted in the United States Air Force, embedded, real-time software engineering industry (the original Software CMM) industry.  Six Sigma, on the other hand, is mostly heavily rooted in the manufacturing quality, statistical process control arena.  It is important to note that both Six...

I guess it’s about time for me to jump into the deep water. With this post, I will begin the discussion of what to my mind are key differences between CMMI and Six Sigma. In fairness to both approaches, I’ll probably take a few posts to discuss the differences that I feel are crucial to characterizing each approach/ method. Let me start by saying, obviously, there are differences. The mere fact that both approaches and...