CM: THE NEXT GENERATION - Another Year Gone By

If we do these things properly, we won't just see an jump in SCM maturity.  We'll see a fire that spreads the wealth.
 
1. Bring Next Generation CM and ALM education to the market place.
I have seen significant efforts to adopt a more advanced CM or ALM solution in the marketplace over the past couple of years.  However, these efforts are just a fraction of what there should be.  Organizations, for the most part, still seem happy to go ahead with low end or open source solutions, saving $10,000's, yet missing $100,000s in unrealized productivity gains.  Or they're willing to pay big bucks for solutions that have been popular in the past but no longer deliver the state of the art in capability.

Some of this is the fear factor.  CM Managers have been through a lot, and they expect CM/ALM solutions, not just to be costly and time consuming, but to require significant investment in expertise.  That's not the case anymore.  But not enough people understand this and so we really need to educate the market place.

While it's true that open source solutions are gradually improving, and that there are many commercial solutions out there that are near par with these solutions, there are also solutions out there that really exceed these lower end options.  And the annual savings potential is staggering:

• CM Administration
• Multiple Site Capabilities
• Tool Glue and maintenance thereof
• Customization costs
• Additional training costs
• Lost productivity
• Lower quality

There are companies spending $10M in CM administration alone.  Plus licensing costs, consulting costs, upgrades, and so forth.  Just to keep the CM solution "working".  Tell me of a company that wouldn't like to recover $100M from the past 10 years of CM.  Yet life goes on without change.  Why?  Education.  Sure cmcrossroads helps, but there's a wider audience out there that needs to be educated.

2. Give Software Configuration Managment training and certification a boost.
Although there are a number of tool-specific and process-specific SCM courses and even certifications, there are too few good generic SCM training courses.  The industry needs to address this and this is one area where I'm looking to jump in starting in 2010. We need:

• Introductory training so that those thrust into SCM can learn, not just to tread water but to excel.
• Integrated training on SCM and Project Management so that we don't have competing factions, but a unified one.
• In depth training on the real SCM issues and how addressing them dramatically reduces costs.
• Better education on evaluation of SCM tools and processes - what works and what to avoid.

On top of all of this, we need an industry expert peer group to review course material and offer their certification credentials on good materials.  Certification of ideas is all we're looking for here.  Not a whole course or program.  Just a 4-star expert rating for the various ideas, solutions, and best practices that can be drawn upon to get us to the point where we can really talk about certifying SCM professionals.

It's too often that I'll see a quality standard that is weak in substance, but strong in certification.  This must not happen in the CM world.  But how do we get consensus in a discipline which is anything but disciplined. Maybe the CM Journal should run a "Certified" Corner, plus blog, where it takes an idea and has it's authors/editors certify it or at least rate it.  Over the course of a couple of years, we could have a full library of certified practices.

3. SCM: Aim higher.
Well over 30 years I've been