Behind the Curtain at TCG

100% of TCG Project Managers Now PMP Certified

TCG achieved yet another milestone this week: every single one of our project managers is now Project Management Professional (PMP) certified by the Project Management Institute. Nina Preuss crossed the line (in a good way) -- good job, Nina! You can read about it here.

At TCG, we are committed to the best practices captured in the PMI's Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and our project managers have either been PMP certified or on the road to it. With Nina's achievement, we now have 100% coverage.

TCG to Support Transformation of DOJ COPS Business Processes

We just posted this news at TCG.com regarding some Lean Six Sigma efforts ongoing at DOJ COPS.

Job: Business Consultant/Architect

We just posted a new job opening to the TCG web site, here, for a Business Consultant/Architect. If you've got system analysis, business analysis, and architecture experience, take a look!

ITIL and EA are not the same thing

GCN has an interview with Malcolm Fry, who's considered the "father" of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Fry says that "ITIL is, to some degree, enterprise architecture". But as Wikipedia accurately describes, ITIL is a set of service management best practices. It's got nothing to do with describing the performance, business, services, technology, and data structures that support an organization. It's everything to do with process and nothing to do with architecture.

I will certainly concede that the tools that support ITIL (change management databases, incident reporting systems, etc.) realize some elements of an EA but they aren't the EA itself.

There's enough confusion about what EA is without this kind of muddying-the-waters. I'm by no means an EA expert but I know enough to see that claiming "ITIL is EA" is complete hooey. It's like saying that CMMI is EA -- total nonsense.

I hope to investigate ITIL in a bit more depth in coming weeks. It originated in the UK and I suspect it can be well applied here in the US to fill in the gaps between the PMBOK (which describes how to run an IT project organization) and CMMI process areas (which describe how to conduct systems integration work). Has anyone got experience in mapping these against each other?

CMMI FAQ

TCG's Senior CMMI Level 2 Mentor, Maureen Sullivan, just published a great article on www.tcg.com: What is CMMI Level 2 ... and How Do We Get There?: A Brief Guide to CMMI Level 2 for Small Software Development Organizations. The article is intended to provide a base level of information about CMMI by answering seven common questions that Maureen's received while delivering our CMMI Mentoring Service. If you have more questions about CMMI or process maturity, send them our way.

Scott Berkun project management reading

The Personal MBA is "an entrepreneurial approach to business education." A key part of this fantastic idea is The Personal MBA 40 which is a list of superior books about business, and two reading groups have been formed to discuss and learn from each selection. One of the PMB40 books is The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun which, I'm told, is a very good guide to being and improving as a PM. Something rather wonderful is on offer to those participating in the PMBA40 book groups:

Scott Berkun, author of The Art of Project Management, has graciously offered to participate directly in our first PMBA book reading, answering questions and expanding on the text of the book. Scott, as most of you know, has a lot of knowledge about project management and a wealth of personal experience to offer. His willingness to teach us more about project management presents a great opportunity for us to learn together and get us started off on the right foot as a group.

If you'd like to join a PMBA40 book group, go and register on the PersonalMBA site. The latest group is called "Bravo", and the invitation to join is here.