SEPG Europe 2009 - Themes

Most conferences have a theme which provides a focus for the proceedings, and prospective presenters are invited to submit proposals aligned to that theme. This year the SEPG Europe 2009 theme was "The Next Generation of Process". My initial reaction to this was one of some surprise: many commentators and practitioners would argue that we've still not mastered the first generation of process so perhaps this would be a case of running before walking (but more on that another time!). I wasn't entirely surprised to see that there were only a few sessions which were really aligned to the focus theme. However, my experience is that conferences tend to generate their own sub-themes as presenters independently or collaboratively hone in on certain common topics. This year was no exception, and in my opinion there were several predominate sub-themes in evidence.

• People and culture
• Multi-model synergies
• CMMI and Agility
• CMMI for Services

Of course some of these themes are recurrent at conference, but this year I felt that there was an energy pertaining to the first two items on my list in particular. CMMI for Services was clearly on the agenda as the latest offering from the CMMI product team and the SEI was on a hard sell mission. The debate about CMMI and Agility will no doubt continue ad nauseam, primarily because so many of the arguments are generated by people who nothing about either subject or who cannot understand their counterpart's viewpoint. I'd rather not get involved in the discussion - life's too short! So the key sub-themes are around People and Multiple models, both of which are concepts I've been advocating for the past few years. Next blog entries will speak to these in more detail... Print this post