Work sum

Mainly focusing on plans for the remaining months of the contract's first term. Taking some ITIL-derived documents and activities, and elaborating on them to extract a customer-agnostic list of IM/IT processes. We will then take the processes and procedures we have been provided and do a cross-check to see what our current inventory looks like relative to a possible to-be model. Also, still trying to get the project rolling in EAC, and may end up attending some EAC-specific training with the heads of state as it were. • Also, looking at visualization and navigation options for making surfable maps of BP/BPR. Possible extensions in the future to provide a place for trend analysis etc. • Apparently still on the hook for realtime IT dashboard. The service desk software must be gently excised from the enterprise. Maybe that is possible after all the trouble (downtime) it caused this past week. I hope so. It would open the door for SOA efforts which are more aligned to upper echelon requests for net-centricity.

Re-in stall

Looking to start using the laptop as the main music and video workstation, so I gave in and reinstalled Vista. The biggest issue with XP was trying to find proper drivers for some of the features, most importantly the ieee1394 ports. Since I'll be using the AudioFire2 with the laptop now, that pretty much forced my hand. I'll miss XP. (Windows 2000 is still the best (only?) non-BS-OS, but life goes on. Well, I guess DOS was about as non-BS as possible.)

So anyway, to compliment my new gear setup, I decided to get around to grabbing my free upgrade to FLStudio 8. After installing, the longtime desire for a plain ol' multitracker / portastudio manifested as an upgrade to the Producer Edition for the audiotrack-in-playlist support. Hopefully that works like I'm imagining it will. I think FLStudio has finally surpassed Cubase and Logic. No joke.

While I was at it, I grabbed Visual Studio 2008 Standard as well because VS2005 on Vista was a real pita the first time around.

In other news, I picked up two books for CMMI. CMMI SCAMPI Distilled: Appraisals for Process Improvement and CMMI Assessments: Motivating Positive Change. I hope they're decent. Can't be too bad, I imagine. Report later.

Received my ITIL score: 37/40 for 92.5%. I missed one question in each of Service Desk / Incident Mgmt, Problem Mgmt, and Service Level Mgmt. Those were the areas I was most comfortable with, so I probably didn't pay close enough attention to the questions. :o

Let's play 40 questions

ITIL cert exam was today. Overall, there was nothing unexpected. Finished the 40 questions in about half an hour. Results maybe Wednesday. • The seminar was well worth the time and money - not only because of the expected successes in the exam, but because we got our customer involved in this, and three lead IT folks participated in the seminar and took the test. It was a great way to get everyone thinking from the same point of view. Now that we have a common lexicon and and understanding of the ITIL "processes", I think everything will start to fall into place including a better understanding of how to proceed with all the BPR efforts. • Perhaps the most important result was that the seminar and testing gave customer and contractor a common goal which was very low risk (i.e., possible negative outcomes only significantly impact the individual(s), while the possible positive outcome can be shared by the group). It was kind of like a war games exercise - no one truly loses, and everyone comes out increasingly assured of the other's competence. I guess it is a trust / team-building type of experience that is actually relevant to the real tasks at hand whereas a non-business-at-hand experience would miss the mark. • On a closing note, ITIL implementation is a great way to lay a foundation for CMMI because aligning to ITIL will provide the 'business engine' that will be tuned within CMMI, and not, I think, vice versa. Also, I don't agree with the view that CMMI-DEV is only for software and ITIL is only for backoffices and helpdesks. They are both concepts that aid in the orchestration of people- processes- tools systems.

ITIL seminar

ITIL seminar this week. The material is looking pretty good - better than just reading the ITIL docs - as having a sense of business context makes some of the more dubious ITIL verbiage a little clearer on the reality side. Certification exam is set for Friday.

Artifactual

Today we started taking a look at IM's collection of docs. We'll be getting these sorted and put into a matrix of CMMI subpractices as artifacts. What I'm thinking is that an excel spreadsheet is a horrible way to do this, even in the short term, but it's a lower barrier to entry. • Definitely am going to have to figure out a way to make an intranet type resource, dynamic (web server) or not (web pages in a directory). Hopefully this will either be a satisfactory solution, or it will provide a starting point for making a move into a proper set of web apps.

Solar

Spent some time taking a look at the next three months. Looks like the timeframe for net-centricity is stretching out to be a long-haul initiative. • I think that at this point we're more interested in the as-is, so that if/when (?) we get around to the to-be, the customer will be able to make decisions based on a reliable impact analysis. • At any rate, we're now part of the EAC. Still waiting to get our project listed, and then we'll be on our way.

Time for less R & more D

Applied for an enterprise architecture (EA) project to be created on the client's overarching 'EA central' environment. This 'EAC', as I will refer to it, is intended to coalesce the EAs from many organizations within the client's larger organization of which the client is a member. Coalesce, meaning to begin a process of sharing architecture features, forming common data definitions, encouraging reuse, etc. I'm beating around the bush with names here, because I don't think I should use the real names in a public blog. Anyway, we're pretty sure the EA we create will become our CMDB at least in terms of allowing the client to see which people/processes/tools will be affected by any changes in the organization during impact analysis. Not only that, but it will form a large part of the Process Asset Library (PAL) via a huge collection of OV-5s. I am going to be the EA's Chief Architect, which is a slight honor. Everyone joked that they only agreed to that because if something went wrong, I'd be the one to get in trouble. Hooray.

The final three months of the first contract term are here and planning begins today. I need to rework our informal DoDAF OV/SV hybrid to reflect the fact that our CMMI PAL will actually be a conglomeration of applications. What will happen, we're expecting, is that these apps will be stitched together so that they appear to be a single source by making a browsable front-end. So, the serious systems integration tasks are right around the corner. I'll post the OV/SV thing when I'm done - it is generic enough to publicize and I think it would be interesting to other systems engineers involved in ITIL, CMMI, and DoDAF.

Zone

Talked up the parser today and checked in on some BPR-related issues. The self-generating code is working out great. • Advice: When you're asked to develop a piece of software, even a quick one, write code that writes THAT code FOR YOU. You shouldn't be building things. You should be building things that build things. • Went over the May 20th stuff with NW and picked up some proprietary binary formats for dinner. Should be able to at least crunch them a bit in 010 (http://www.sweetscape.com/010editor/) and maybe affect some changes. There's some plaintext XML interleaved between the binary chunks. • Hexidecimal is your friend. (Makes me wanna write for the PIC18 again. I think I will design some more MIDI/CV circuits soon.)

Feedback

Another cave day. Cranked out the first pass of the parser. The docs quickly went from ugly to mildly comprehensible to squeaky clean. Decent success. Parser output is regular line item delimited text with type identifiers - your basic event-driven parse-as-you-go type stream reader. • Second pass on the code yielded tighter organization, and now the parser is writing code for itself (and for me). Feedback.

s///g

Met with the President of US Operations today and discussed efforts related to intra-company engineering reuse, etc. • Got a new request for writing a tokenizer/parser to grok some standards publications. The overall goal is to make the information computationally available, and feed it into a number of efforts via some transitional formats. Targets include Excel, C# lib, Project, web service, process asset library, BPMN notation, etc. Regex.

Cave day

Wrote a client for AD testing. Need to see what the schema classes provide.

Battle plans

Discussed scope of plans moving towards having SI efforts in place for the remainder of the FY. Targets include AD, SA, iGrafx, dashboards, lifecycle accounting (somehow) and the whole SOA that links everything together. If not a SOA, then web services, but SOA in the back of the mind. Need to work on the diagram showing how everything falls into place, probably as a set of DoDAF OV outputs. Curious to see how big of a bite we will attempt. • Took a very brief look at accessing AD. Need to dev a C# test kit on/for the lab servers and then roll that into the data half of a web service.

The opposite of work

No work today. (FH)

Detectives 'r' us

Tried to track down the list of domain apps, but the holder was out of office today. Looks like there will be sufficient information for determining requisite DoDAF artifacts per app, with some extra footwork done with IM/IT to get a handle on update frequencies and app magnitudes. • In other news, worked a bit on the args for having some kind of lifecycle accounting tool. CMMI OPD process area pretty much mandates it (and also MA area, depending on the interpretation of what 'measurements' is measuring), so showing that along with a UML use-case diagram should suffice. Essentially, the point to make is that we need a mechanism for capturing the life of a process instantiation, and this should double as, or work into (via BPEL?), the appropriate process diagrams from the (to-be) process asset library. • The recurrent iGrafx and/or SA question reared its head again today with the news that it's available with the dev seat on the N-M boxen. • Tried to get moving on JB's request for assistance with CQ cross-domain javascript issues, but the tools aren't in place. • This link completely rules: http://www.cmmi.de/cmmi_v1.2/browser.html#hs:null
• Writeup for process asset library and measurement repository is done.

Pushing boxes

Today, I had a phone conf with Telelogic crew about Systems Architect. Studied up on some relevant docs. NW says we need to start catalogging apps in the domain to scope SA license needs as well as work this into the refinement of the SER process. I'm picturing a spreadsheet with some checklist type stuff - db? frequency? magnitude? etc. • I've also got to work on the blurb for kick starting a look into what a lifecycle-accounting support there will be on the SI side.