CMM Implementation Guide: Choreographing Software Process Improvement
Author: Kim Caputo
List Price: $54.99
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ISBN: 0201379384
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (14 April, 1998)
Sales Rank: 35,249
Average Customer Rating: 2.93 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
About overcoming politics and human nature - great advice
This book is not really about the technical aspects of implementing the key processes and attaining a specific level of maturity. It's about something much more difficult - overcoming organizational resistance to change.The path to achieving capability levels 2 through 5 are well defined in other books. Each process area and its requirements are well documented in Mark Paulk's authoritative book. From the technical perspective it may be cut and dried, and in a perfect world not populated by those illogical creatures called people Mr. Paulk's book is all you need.
Unfortunately people are not logical and a clearly laid out roadmap is not enough. You quickly discover that the path to even CMM level 2 is fraught with perils that are strangely missing from the technical books on CMM. Overcoming these perils are what Ms. Caputo's book is all about. She describes techniques for overcoming the resistance to implementation. Instead of rehashing what you need to implement in order to get to a specific level, she tells you how to accomplish the implementation part - the part that is not cut and dried. She does this by relating her own experience, and I can assure you that if you're tasked with implementing CMM (or any other program or initiative for that matter) you can learn a lot about human and organizational nature from this book. You will also learn a lot about what works when effecting change and how to counter the inevitable resistance you'll run into.
If you're looking for CMM technical and process-related information get The Capability Maturity Model: Guidelines for Improving the Software Process by Mark Paulk. If you are actually responsible for implementing it get this book.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Great CPI/CMM "Jumpstarter"!!!!!
This book beats anything by others on adopting the CMM. Others take the "overkill" approach of orienting one with massive technically oriented information (which is sometimes akin to "sinking sampans with nukes versus 500 hundred pounders with fuse extenders"). This book is a breath of fresh air in getting introduced to how to implement/adopt technology such as the CMM. I say this book beats anything by others because there is no "techno-babble" to deal with. Ms. Caputo's use of dance choreography is pertinent as it emphasized to me that the typical technology adoption approach of Level 1 organizations of MBSAUYBII (management by stumbling around until you bump into it) is truly "chaotic". What we are really trying to achieve as we go from level to level is a fluid, organized approach that will truly support a smooth transition to a new corporate software engineering paradigm. An added bonus is the included CD which helps o! ne jumpstart the management briefings which are critical to initiating a continuous process improvement (CPI) program. The low price tag saved me thousands of dollars in establishing and initiating my CPI program.
Rating: 1 out of 5
If you are learning CMM, this book will not help you.
The book spends an overwhelming portion of its content focusing on a ballet and how it relates to CMM. As an author, I got the impression she was using this as a technique to meet her page quota. The author overuses glittering generalizations about how to manage people and an organization. In that sense, this book is a rehash of useless management fluff from the 80s. This book contains about 15-20 pages worth of useful information and should cost $10. I will never buy a book published by UNISYS again.
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