It is hard to believe it was just last weekend that I attended TedxMidAtlantic 2012. This was my third year attending TedxMidatlantic and I have learned that the most shocking, awe-inspiring, and jaw-dropping talks are usually not those coming out of famous political figures, rather those people who you did not know before, who fight so many battles every day, and after listening to them, your world's boundaries expand, possibilities not only grow, you think anything is possible! The theme of this year's conference was being fearless. This is how they phrased it on their program:
When we stop worrying about what might go wrong, we discover what is truely possible. We celebrate the stories of the people who weren't afraid to fail, who overcame the odds, and persisted when the look was bleak. BE FEARLESS.
And there were some fearless people there, all right. Now, this is the story that made all hundreds of us go to deep silence, and shed tears together, and yes, it was confirmed there were some good amount of man tears shed during this conference!
The organizers did a nice job of adding beautiful music at the end of each session. It was good for taking a mental break and changing the mood. We listened to a nice opera towards the end of a session, and then when it was done, the moderator slightly announced, oh by the way, the opera singer, Ms. Charity Sunshine, has had two double lung transplants in the past! While we were chewing on what we had just heard and how such music can come out of having two double lung surgeries, she came on stage for her speech: "Three years ago, today, I came out of a coma after xx many days. I had to learn to talk, walk, and remember again. ........", and then she went on saying how she started singing again, performing concerts, attending ceremonies of world leaders, etc. How her new lungs are being rejected by her body again, and how she won't get another transplant, how she faces death every day as she lives, and how she believes through love only we become ethereal. She expressed her gratitude to her donors, that every breath she takes, every note she sings, is theirs. How life continues after one dies, if organs are donated to continue and save other lives.
I was overwhelmed by her music, her experience, her speech, and courage. If she can be a world-class opera singer after two lung transplants and being in coma for so long, what is stopping us to achieve our goals? Be Fearless. p.s. Below is a CNN story on her. I will post her talk once it is available via TedXMidatlantic. Also, here is Chaity's website.
JPSS stands for the Joint Polar Satellite Systems. NASA builds JPSS for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), that is JPSS is procured by NOAA through NASA. It is the United States's next generation polar orbiting satellite systems. Its goal is to ensure continuity and increase timeliness and accuracy of weather and climate events forecasts, public warnings, global measurements of atmospheric and oceanic conditions such as ozone, surface sea temperature, and reducing potential loss of human life and property. The primary user of JPSS satellites is NOAA's National Weather Services. "Data from the JPSS system will be made available by the U.S. government to domestic and international users in support of the U.S. commitments for the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS)" [2].
JPSS satellites will fly and their scientific data will be processed by the JPSS- Common Ground System (JPSS-CGS). The JPSS-CGS consists of a Command, Control, and Communications Segment (C3S) and the Interface Data Processing Segment (IDPS), both of which are build by Raytheon company. Major components of CGS have been delivered and NPP satellite is the first satellite to use the CGS system and some key sensors as a risk reduction and early flight opportunity for JPSS.
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The first spacecraft, JPSS-1, will take advantage of technologies developed through the Suomi NPP satellite which was launched on October 28, 2011. The JPSS payload of Scientific Instruments includes:
Visible/Infrared Imager/Radiometer Suite (VIIRS).
Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS): developer and builder is ITT corporation.
Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS): developer and builder is Northrop Grumman.
Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS): developer and builder is Ball Aerospace.
I have heard CMMI a lot in my organization, how it is a set of best practices, how we should follow it, ...., but I have never formally used it since I mostly work on research and development stages of projects, pretty much right after a scientist thought of it, way before it is matured, integrated into larger systems, and are operational. It seems like as I am growing up professionally, I can no longer ignore, skip over, or deny existence of things like CMMI! So, I have decided to take a look at what the hell CMMI really is? There are books and classes on this topic, but for now a few websites and articles are probably a good point to start from.
CMMI stands for Capability Maturity Model Integration. It is an approach for process improvement, for increasing performance. It is not a standard or requirement, but a set of best practices for improving processes. It is a way of structuring and organizing efforts such as development of large data systems. Surprise: Google does not use Agile nor CMMI practices. Why? They do not believe in structure and organization. For the rest of us trapped in or chosen to be trapped in structures, let's carry on! :-)
First of all CMMI is patented by Carnegie Mellon University, and was developed by experts in government, industry, and Software Engineering Institute at CMU.
CMMI addresses three areas: Development, Services, and Acquisition. It has two representations: continuos and staged. The continuos representation focuses on processes that address an organization's immediate business objectives and goals, processes that have high importance and risk associated to them. The staged representation provides sequence of improvements to evaluate maturity of projects and organizations.
There are 5 maturity levels defined in CMMI for Development:
Initial: Processes are unpredictable, poorly controlled, and reactive.
Managed: Processes are characterized for projects and are often reactive.
Defined: Processes are characterized for the organization and are proactive.
Quantitatively Managed: Processes are measured and controlled.
Optimizing: Focus is on process improvement.
There are several core CMMI processes at different maturity levels including, but not limited to, organization process definition, process performance, process performance management, training, project monitoring and control, project planning, measurement and analysis, and configuration and risk management.
Organizations are not certified in CMMI, they get appraised by SEI and are awarded different maturity level or capability achievement profile ratings. The SEI published that 60 organizations have measured increases in performance in categories of schedule, productivity, cost, quality and customer satisfaction.
Do you use CMMI in your work or organization? If yes, please share your examples, whether or not you found it effective and helpful, and your lessons learned.
A few days ago, I attended a workshop on "Sound of Silence". It was about conscious and often unconscious choices we make that results in organizational silence, how such choices affects productivity, efficiency, and morale of an organizations, and how to face different fears, speak up when needed, and prevent it from happening. This post and probably the subsequent ones are my notes from this workshop.
This workshop was "an admission that like all other human-centric organizations, we are susceptible to organizational silence simply because we are not perfect at communication, and that it creeps even in the loudest meetings, from a perception that it is safer to stay silent than to speak up, and that it plays an important role in our mission's success". It was acknowledging "Silence like a cancer grows" (Paul Simon).
We learned about different resources available to us to speak up and be heard when immediate superiors or team members do not listen to us. We are lucky now to work in a place with so many rules and trainings not only to protect whistle blowers but also to encourage them to do so. Little did I know about the stories behind our No Fear training, a mandatory training that federal employees are required to take every two years.
The story was very moving and powerful, especially when hearing it from its own protagonist while being with her in the same room. It was the story of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientist. She had learned that one of her agency's grantees (contractors), was spending their grant for mining in South Africa, and that their practices was poisoning, sickening, and killing local people and ruining the environment there due to unsafe use and handling of a chemical called Vanadium. She learned about a problem to say the least, she reported it to her supervisor. She was told to shut up and not concern herself with such issues.
She performed her own investigation. We watched a movie of one of her
trips to South Africa, interviewing local people. A widow telling the
story of how quickly she lost her husband after him joining the mine,
how current workers were seeing blood in their urine, eyes, or ears and
how children and wives got sick and contaminated from washing workers'
cloths or sleeping next to them. We learned that most people in that
movie are now deceased.
She fought for five years, with a government agency who receives free
lawyers from the department of justice. She first lost her high profile
science project and eventually her job. She had to get loans and
second mortgages on her house to afford attorneys. But she won. She
won big. She won a lawsuit against EPA based on racial, sexual, and
hostile work environment. After five years, NO FEAR ACT
was signed into law in May 2002, the first Civil Right and
whistle-blower law in 21st century, and the first civil rights bill that
was passed unanimously in the house. Our protagonist is Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo the author of No Fear and founder of No Fear Coalition, and the world is a better place because of her.
She said that she wrote the book for five reasons: to fullfil a promise to South Africans that she will tell their story to the world, to challenge the culture of absue and silence that instills fear, to tell the story of the first passage of civil right law, to provide a guide and narrative so that when you take the NO FEAR training, you learn the sacrifices and the stories to give you these rights.
She reminded us that the goal is complete elimination of discrimination in federal government and that we should not confuse the tools to get to a goal with the goal itself (i.e. such laws, bills, and trainings are tools not the sign of no discrimination and abuse).
She is not done yet! She is going back to court to prove her job loss or firing was a retaliation act for her whistle blowing. It was so hard to believe that the conversations she has had with her superiors, the interactions, the threats she received, all happened just a few years ago in the U.S. I realized how lucky and fortunate I am to have not experienced such abuses and threats in my work place. I hope I never have to. However, if I have to, I know that there are laws protecting me, thanks to Dr. Coleman-Adebayo and people like her.
A favorite quote from my project management class is the following:
"You cannot produce a baby in one month by impregnating nine women."
If a task takes nine months to complete, if it requires nine months, it requires nine months. Throwing more money and hiring more people, is not always the solution to getting something done faster. So, just define the tasks that need to be done to achieve your goal, prioritize, schedule, and do them within budget and schedule. There are no shortcuts!
Here is another one:
"So how do projects get to be weeks, or months behind...? ......Drifting one day at a time."
Apparently, Louisiana state is the only state in the U.S. that practices Roman Law as opposed to the Common Law practiced in the rest of the country.* It has many implications, one of which is not having the right to a trial by a jury in civil cases.
Ever since the Venus transit on June 5th, I have been wanting to write about what I learned about Venus at lectures I attended on that day. Sadly I do not recall all the cool stuff I learned, except two major ones:
1) It takes Venus longer to rotate once around itself than it does to rotate around the Sun. That is, Venus days are longer than its years! While it takes 224.65 earth days for Venus to rotate around the Sun, it takes 243 days for it to rotate around itself.
2) Venus surface is very hot! Its atmosphere is about 500 degrees in Celsius, more than 900 degrees in Fahrenheit, hot! Thus, no mission will last long in its atmosphere or on its surface. For example, Venera 4 sent scientific data from Venus atmosphere for 93 minutes before being crush by pressure and reaching Venus surface. Even with all advances in cooling and hardware technologies today, it is expected that we cannot send data for more than 4-5 hours from Venus atmosphere and surface.
Venus Express of the European Space Agency (ESA) is currently orbiting Venus. Its seven year mission will end in December 2012.
