Part V
Outfitting Your Expedition (PI Resources)

Scholars are a nation’s treasure; learning is like a delicious feast.
Chinese proverb

Common experience is the gold reserve which confers an exchange value
on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences,
all our pronouncements are cheques drawn on insufficient funds.
René Daumal (1908–1944)

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are
reduced to immobility. In life’s ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.
Henry Miller (1891–1980)

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship… the act that
endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.
Peter F. Drucker

Surviving using CMMI or any other process improvement initiative is truly dependent on the kind of help you can get. As we said in Part 1, process improvement isn’t trivial. Breadth of knowledge and depth of experience are significant factors in a smooth journey. Because many of us don’t have either (at least when we’re getting started), we need to get help from every place we possibly can. We recommend that you equip your team with as much good, solid information as you can find from those who have gone before. In Part V, we provide instructions or references to many of the resources we believe will be useful to you.

The resources come in various forms. Books, articles, and Web sites provide basic understanding. Conferences and workshops highlight lessons learned and new ways to approach difficult problems. Organizations, people, and services provide more personal consulting and training. Tools and techniques help you leverage others’ experience.

Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list (although we were pretty exhausted by the time we finished it). The resources we present are only a subset of the ones we know about, but we do believe they can help until you find something that works better for you.

If at this point you feel a bit overwhelmed, we invite you to visit the AddisonWesley Web page for this book, www.awprofessional.com/title/0321422775, and enjoy some Process Improvement humor: “The Stout Maturity Model.”

Have fun!