Wednesday, February 13, 2002

 
Posted by Mike Tarrani 7:20 PM
Random Musings. It's amazing how one thought triggers another until ideas emerge out of the mesh of random thoughts. Earlier I was thinking about a few milestone events: my close friend Marcia Hopkins has a birthday on the 16th, followed by Linda's birthday on the 17th, and the 35th anniversary of my joining the Navy on the 20th.

What brought these thoughts into focus was the fact a neighbor revealed that her brother was in the same industry as I, which led to e-mail exchanges, which led to a visit to his company ChangeBridge. It turns out that ChangeBridge is an SEI Transition Partner for introduction to the CMMI Systems Engineering/Software Engineering Courses and SCAMPI Assessment Services.

That fact linked me to Thinking Minds, Inc. because Linda and I did some earlier CMM strategy planning with Unmesh Laddha, Thinking Minds' CEO. It didn't end there - I did a quick Google search on ChangeBridge and discovered that Mark Servello, who I knew over 14 years ago from a Navy assignment as MIS director, was associated with ChangeBridge. That assignment, by the way, was for a large Navy facility in San Diego and was the one that capped off my 22-year Navy career.

Naturally more thoughts entered my head - CMM, San Diego, process improvement and related connections that I hadn't fully sorted out. These thoughts, though, led to more research, which led to ProcessVelocity, LLP, a San Diego-based consulting firm that is also an SEI Transition Partner. This small consulting firm also provides some innovative services, including three jumpstart services designed to assess and jumpstart a client's SQA, SCM or XP (eXtreme Programming) initiatives. While I was visiting the site I also downloaded two valuable files in Windows helpfile format: CMMI Staged and CMMI Continuous representations.

For some reason my thoughts turned to ISO9000, which led to NASA's Independent Software Verification and Validation site's ISO 9001 documents, all of which are in PDF and MS Word formats. This collection of documents exemplifies how to develop an ISO 9001-compliant quality manual. If you think ISO 9001 is unimportant or does not support the CMM read my 9 July 2001 review of ISO 9000-3: A Tool for Software Product and Process Improvement on Amazon.

Time to get out of daydream mode and back to work.