CMMi Meeting

Thanks to Sudha(my SET trainer who motivated to blog) and Arun(my younger brother, who inspired me by his wonderful blog) who en kindled to blog.

Team meeting on 25th September wasn’t a usual meeting. A day before itself we got an email to our PHS ODC group email id from my PM which clearly explained about the agenda, day, time and location of the meeting. The agenda was quite simple, learning CMMi (to me a boring and dry subject). As per the email that we got, we should gather at First floor conference hall between 2.30pm and 3.30pm.

The clock ticked 2.30; few including me became busy at work, may be we would have forgot about the meeting. Thanks to my colleagues who reminded us about the meeting and started kidding each other by saying these people become busy whenever we have meetings. By laughing, I WIN+L’ed my pc and marched towards the first floor conference room pretending to be an interesting learner on CMMi ;-) and at the same time thinking of the first team meeting with my new PM Jayakumar. As soon as I open the door and entered the room, Jayakumar smiled and turned to the board and wrote 2:36pm – 12. Above that I saw 2:30 – 0, 2:32 – 2, 2:34- 4. I thought late entrants were noted, oh my first meet itself become a flop. Jayakumar told, we can wait for another 10 mins for the rest of the team members to gether and start our meeting. Till 2:50 the list continued, so sad. He started the meeting with the question, how many of you were not aware of CMMi? Except Mahendran’s hand raise none raised. Oh, Jayakumar became too happy and starting saying in a high pitch tone “O my job become easy guys, I don’t have to waste time in explaining CMMi when you guys were aware of that” There was a huge laugh in the conference hall and people started looking each other and broke the silence which prevailed over there until and took some time to come back to normal.


Later he asked what do you think of this time and number that I wrote on the board. After a brief pause few responses came. They are,



  1. Communication didn’t reach properly.
  2. Next time, will reach at correct time.
  3. Process wasn’t followed.

and some more which I couldn’t remember :-)
He, for every response from our end, wrote all the points on the board and totally encouraged us by saying, the responses what I got from you were all related to CMMi and you guys have good knowledge in them but the problem is you need to learn how to match them or like fill up the blanks. Yes he was correct.


He started saying 3 examples that encountered in his life. When he was in Delhi, nearby the Delhi railway station there used to be a “Kaiyenthi Bhavan” style food centre where a guy used to prepare chola poori in same taste every day. In another example, Hotel Saravana bhavan, where the coffee taste across all the branches remained the same. In another example, Gillete razor. Gillete razor that lasted for one month for him now came for only 15 days. In above three cases who all followed process and who weren’t?. Few told the first two followed the process so the taste remained same but the latter didn’t so the Gillete razor instead of 30 days it came only for 15 days. After the debate we had among us, Jayakumar told all the above 3 followed the process. Even the Gillete razor company also followed the process. The reason for reduced day can be due to some mistake over any specific unit or due to roughness of the skin or improper usage of the razor. If a customer writes this as a complaint to the customer feed back department, they will check for root cause for the problem and even they replace for their faulty product, if applicable. Yes, we all agreed with this.
Also Jayakumar asked us to speak in CMMi language. That is nothing but speaking in numbers. Instead of saying, today I will go early to the office and fix as many bugs as I can and complete as many stories, we can say today I will reach office at 9am, fix 8 bugs which will take half an hour each, complete 2 stories which will take 2 hrs each. By saying in this manner it will be easy for us to track everything and if anything goes wrong then the root cause can be easily tracked and can be corrected and we temporarily stopped as clock ticked 3.30pm where we are supposed to stop the meeting. All eagerly waiting for the next week session.


The session was a total success and everybody was fully motived through out the meeting to learn CMMi. I studied CMMI from many PPT’s and websites but this session was something unique and happily achieved its objective hundred percent, thanks to Jayakumar for his approach on teaching this.


[At the start of the meeting itself Jayakumar asked for everybody’s interaction and said none of your questions will be counted for appraisal and asked us to raise any question even it can be a stupid question and then he continued by asking himself how can a question be stupid?. May be because of that all interacted? I don’t know :-)]