CMMi. Now I find it quite difficult even to explain to people in the software industry what CMMi is. What even CMM is in the first place and why it is different from an ISO certification, for example, and various other questions about it.
"Oh we have a lot of documentation! I think we document everything we do. We should get through", says someone and then I realise that there are terribly lay-people even within the industry, as far as quality and process understanding is concerned!
This being the case, how do I explain to my Dad that we have got CMMi-Level 5 certification and over the phone at that!? I tried to tell him something then finally gave up and said "It is a ertification Dad, similar to the ISO thing you see so many people claiming. only its way different! (Its a common joke now that the Chennai Airport has a small board saying "Kamaraj Domestic Terminal" and a huge one proclaiming it to be "ISO 9000:2001 Certified") Anyway, its tough to get and we have achieved the highest level in it which only 40 others in the world have it before us".
Yeah, believe it or not, we are the 41st on the CMMi-5 list. Includes Infosys, Mindtree, Satyam, Motorola India, Boeing, US Army(!) and also a company I've heard of for the first time, "Moksha Technologies" (!!!). Know of that, anyone?
Now having had a couple of days to ponder over it and having put the celebrations (instantly arranged dinner at the Leela Palace) behind me, I realise that getting the certification itself was the easiest thing to do!
I have a customer visit looming large on me Monday morning, and I know they would first think of using this to reduce cost and then would congratulate us! Which, by the way, is the whole point, isn't it? You are certified to produce stuff which would not only be faster, higher, stronger but more importantly, cheaper and with lesser bugs! Somehow, we'll have to use this and other means to remain a "low cost country".
It was a hectic and terrifying 4 weeks. Looking back at it, it was a sort of funny 4 weeks. Multiple project related deadlines were already available for the 17th of September when suddenly it was announced that my project would be assessed too! Blind Panic ensued for sometime and then after calming down and learning what the differences were between CMM and CMMi, I realised that we were doing almost everything and just needed a little tweaking here and there. That, of course, got us the certification finally and my project did well too. And oh, BTW, we did reach the Project Milestones as well!
The practical upshot of all that is that everyone in my team has become terribly quality conscious. All of us now talk in TLAs, (Three Letter Acronyms) and FLAs(4) and go on about OPF, OPD, QPM PPQA, OPP, PIID, OID, PQP, SQA, and stuff like that until people scream at us to stop.
I myself have got obsessed with one of those things, QPM, that is Quantitative Project Management. Usually this involves making control-charts, bar-graphs, pie-charts, Parreto Charts, Fish-bone diagrams and such like until they fill the clearcase VOBs and the configuration manager starts shouting at me. My suggestion of Wagon-wheels, Manhattans and Worms only resulted in the last term being thrown back at me, so I shut-up about it.
This, of course, was clearly brought out as a major weakness in the assessment findings. That is, the fact that we create all these things but don't do practically too much with them. And there-in lies the obsession.
Not that I ain't doing much with the stats, I am. Still there is lots more that can be done with it and I've now been reading books on the stuff all Sunday. I spent the entire 1500 buck gift coupon I got last week on books about Project Management and Statistical Control. We'll come back to the gift coupon topic later.
Now I suddenly find all the Probability Theory and Stochastic Processes leaping up and me and jeering! I am forced to try and think about my painful past where I sat through an entire semester of lectures by one Prof.Naidu and recall whatever I actually listened to. Instead, the only things I seem to remember from his classes are certain funny sounds he used to make and his funny clutching, from time to time, of certain parts of the body,
while making those noises! Who knows what torments he was undergoing!
while making those noises! Who knows what torments he was undergoing!
I am also forced to think about that terrifying 7th semester whenone Prof.Anurag Kumar used to tie me up in knots using some Markov chains of the positive-recurrent kind!
Back in 1993, as I was pondering on whether or not to skiv-off another Naidu lecture, if someone had told me that I would be using all that stuff to do "Quantitative Project Management", I'm sure I'd have laughed at that person and told them to leave me alone as I was debating the important issue of who will get the free-passes for the next play at Chowdiah or maybe the more important issue of the next movie at Lido.
Coincidentally, by some irony of fate, although she is quite normal in all other aspects and neither makes funny noises nor clutches at herself, my Quality Manager's surname coincides with that of the Professor of Probability Theory. Man! That name is haunting me, or what!
In the middle of all this, our group also suddenly decided to celebrate our "year of growth and consolidation". That basically means that we contributed to the daily dose of high-entropy on Hosur Road, by growing from 6 to 200 in a period of 15 months. We had 9 Siemens buses running between Electronics City and various parts of Bangalore. As of today we have 28 of them! Back in 2000, I used to be the only regular to drive to office. These days if I reach at 10am, I don't find a parking spot and we are considering building at 5-storey parking place.
So an all-day outing to a resort outside the city, and obviously I was in the thick of things. Now the term "outside the city" has become a really obsolete. Nothing seems to be actually outside the city anymore. I can remember a time when the Airport used to be outside the city but now it seems to have moved almost to the center of it! For the same reason, the city is not bursting at its seams anymore. It has already burst and there are no more seams holding it.
Somehow a group of about 15 people including me managed to come up with some games and a hastily written skit which we enacted out for the first time on stage without absolutely any practice at all. And somehow it turned out to be a big hit as the outing itself did.
Some awards were instituted a couple of months ago and the first of these were presented on that day. Then my boss came up with some surprise special or one-time awards. One of those was mine for my "outstanding contribution to the recruitment and ramp-up". Now the gentle and intelligent reader will remember (though that miserable worm, the vapid and irreflective reader, will have forgotten)*, that I spoke about a Rs.1500 gift coupon. This, for "Landmark", apart from a trophy and a citation, were what I got as the award.
Now that one terror is gone, I am staring at another, much bigger one. However, this one is much widely known and I have enough people to advice me on it. Whether all that advice is helping or hindering me is something I still haven't made up my mind about though. I am talking of the September appraisal round in Siemens!
Really, conducting an appraisal round for 13 people is not fair on a meek and hapless guy like me! Caught between a growing (exploding more like) market, a seemingly unconcerned HR, and a fuming and threatening set of team-members, we team-leads never have it easy. I now understand the plight of all those team-leads whom I tortured and thoughtlessly half-murdered during the late nineties' boom and how, although I never left the organisation, my hints about doing so must have made them cower.
Well, that's nearly about all that is happening with me. There is a lot happening with Bangalore city, but that in a later email maybe.
cheers!
Bull.
*Quote from Wodehouse. School story called "The Head of Kay's"
or was it "The White Feather"? One of them, anyhow.
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