CMMI Training

After only a few hours of sleep, I was off to a week of training on CMMI, which is the process improvement methodology we are implementing that will lead to a certification this Fall. I've taken the Intro to CMMI course already so this class was intended to provide more details on each concentration area (called Process Areas) within the model. The class was really good and I learned a lot. The model is fairly complex and I was able to get clarification on a lot of things that will be important for our appraisal.

Part of the course involves each student giving a presentation on the way their organization has implemented one of the process areas. My presentation was on Decision Analysis and Resolution (DAR) and how we've implemented it at Platinum. I didn't have much time to prepare since I was out of town the 5 days before the training and was swamped with a proposal before that. Apparently, lack of preparation works for me because several people came up to me and complimented me on my presentation. It was a nice ego boost.

At the end of the class, there is a test to officially pass the class. The other people in the class had been studying for weeks, which made me really nervous since I started studying on Tuesday night. To give you an idea of the amount of material covered, there are 22 process areas (PAs) and each PA has roughly 5 to 10 practices associated with it that help implement that area. We had to know all of those and which practice went with which PA, among other information about the model. Besides that, we were told to know the "key definitions" in the glossary of the CMMI book. Um, what??? The test wasn't too terrible, although I could see how you could easily fail it without some serious studying. I got a 95%- yay me.

The class took up so much time that I didn't even get to unpack from my Florida trip until Friday. I'm an unpack-the-first-day-home kinda gal so this is very out of character.