The CMWG held the first meeting at the beautiful ITT building’s conference room facilities tonight from 6:30PM to approximately 8:30PM with MKS as the vendor.

We held some great discussions with MKS regarding Configuration Management and many lessons learned over the years, collection metrics and CM Trends.

We discussed the future strategy of the CM Working Group and the how to decide content for each meeting.

We talked about the possibility of setting up a WebEx session for each CM Working Group meeting so people could attend the meeting remotely also.

The food was outstanding and the current cost of the meeting which includes dinner is $11 (This included $10 for dinner and dessert and $1 for drink).

A CM Library will be put online on the CMWG website (www.cmwg.org) over time.

We decided as a process improvement to the CM Working Group we have established a volunteer Board of Directors.

The First Board of Directors Team is:

• Pat Doyle
• Corri Lang
• Suzanne Ourand
• Steve Black
• Dick Jefferies
• Jeff Parnes
• Joe Bodin

The main goal of the Board of Directors is to keep the great CM Working Group started by Donett Murphy and Suzanne Ourand (back in 1992) up and running for many years to come.

Some of the meeting topics we are looking for guest speakers so far are:

• Writing a CM Resume
• CMMi
• ITIL
• Clinger Cohen Act
• Sarbanes Oxley
• CM Certifications such as NDIA and UNIX Certifications

The planned date for the next meeting is currently TBD, yet we are planning for a Tuesday in March.

Thanks to everyone who attended tonight, we will be maintaining a list of attendees.

Joe Bodin

CM Working Group Yahoo Group Owner
jbodin@rcn.com
301-580-1699

Here are the notes I took from last night’s CMWG meeting.

Should we use Facebook or Linked-In?

email, IM, meetings,

too many emails

anything to reduce email is useful

Metrics

• more metrics to get cost down
• consulting services don't measure well
• cm is being commoditized
• nobody cares who does it as long as it gets done
• CM managers are concerned that things are not done properly when management does not care
• How much time,
• How much rework.
• Teams (test-dev) on different contracts.

No authority over different groups. Different agendas for each group.

cm goes into processes of all other organizations across the enterprise (cmmi)

conveying the benefits of change is a continuous education process

Link Test orgs into CM system.

More coordination that delivers visibility to CM

Groups need to manage their expectations.

Need to be able to convey to management to do things in a controlled manner.

Difficult to quantify benefits of good CM.

Impact Analysis is hard to do but needs to be presented to management.

Integration of Change and Release Management

Linking tools is nice

Every org is different in the way they handle tickets, problems, changes etc...

Document version control and lack of traceability (lawyers, standards for enterprise as a whole)

Non-consistent version control numbers.

Orgs have not decided there is a need for traceability.

Problems are always at the director level and above. Do not know how to structure organizations.

Short-sighted on financials... too much focus on short-term goals.

System development and service numbers not really investigated.

Qualiy is not a measurement of the bottom line.

NOAA contract success went to cmmi level 5 (used Dimensions)

Group meets every two months. 2nd or 4th Tuesday in March

Join Joe's group. (on the cmwg website)

Future topic, how to come up with a good cm resume

Jeff to try and hold meetings with WebEx for remote folks

April NDIA test in CA this year.

DAU courses are free - Jeff will put on website.

ACDM Membership list on website.

ITIL topic to learn about.

NDIA certification credit sheet for attendees of CMWG meetings.

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Cary Bryczek
Application Engineer
Tel: (703)635-2119
Email: caryb@mks.com