One of the things about this town (Charlotte) is that pretty much every IT person here has worked for either BoA or Wachovia at some point in their careers. Between the two they employ something like 150,000 total employees in Charlotte. In fact, the building I worked in at Wachovia, the CIC, has over 10,000 people in it.
When I worked at Wachovia, the department I was contracting for started the CMM process. The consultants came in, reviewed the processes, and started to put together plans for how to eventually achieve CMM 5. Which, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily bad (though I think they would be much better off trying to be more agile instead of trying to be more rigorous in their process, but that’s for another post). But then Wachovia announced plans to cut 4,000 jobs and $500 Million in costs (My favorite quote after mentioning that Wachovia is posting record revenue: “And chief executive officer Ken Thompson vowed that the company’s strong results would not get in the way of ongoing efforts to cut costs.”). Suddenly, everything becomes a little more relevant.
But, honestly, I hadn’t thought about it much, because I left Wachovia nearly a year ago now. But we interviewed a developer candidate for our team on Tuesday, and he happened to mention that the team he was working on had not pushed to do any kind of process certification (other than the standard Bank stuff). Which got me thinking, I wonder if the departments they don’t want to cut right off the bat they are putting through the CMM process, so that once they reach level 5, they can just redirect the process documents to an off-shore development shop, especially since one of the things I see a lot of the offshore firms pushing is that they are CMM certified.
It will be interesting to watch, especially still having friends at BoA and Wachovia (though we are doing everything we can to hire them away :)).