<bt>Since the early 1990s, the Citizens Development Corps has been aiding medium-size businesses in less-developed areas of the world. Roy Porter, a long-time resident of Vienna, recently volunteered to help them.
Porter, 49, has been involved with the CDC since early last year.
"I saw their Web site, and I thought it looked interesting," he said. "So I sent them my résumé. Their initial reaction was that they had no appropriate openings. Then in December of last year, they contacted me about this assignment."
Porter was offered a job in Bulgaria. His assignment was to assist a software company called Bianor, a company that specializes in Web-based software, as well as some communications software for mobile phones.
Porter was picked for the job because of his experience in the necessary field.
"We were looking for somebody with Capability Maturity Model experience," said Ben Turner, program assistant for CDC. "Roy seemed to have exactly the skill set we were looking for, as well as general management and planning expertise."
"Bianor needed assistance with their Capability Maturity Model Integration certification," Porter said. "CMMI is a software industry standard developed by a software engineering institute in Pittsburgh. It has a number of levels of maturity which companies can be rated against. It compares a company's practices against the model and assigns them a level based on which criteria they meet."
Bianor wanted to achieve CMMI certification for a few reasons.
"For one thing, it's a great marketing tool," said Porter, "because it shows you've been independently assessed as having high maturity. Second, there's the benefits of the practices themselves. By incorporating the practices, you can reduce cost and increase quality."
PORTER WAS there to help Bianor improve its ability to plan projects.
"I worked primarily on a process area called project planning, and developed a step-by step description of how to develop a project in a mature fashion," said Porter. "I gave them a little training, although I didn't go specifically for training, but I gave them information on the model and helped them plan an approach for implementing it."
"Based on the volunteer assessment, Roy did an outstanding job," Turner said. "The company he worked with said that they would definitely consider him for assistance on another job."
"The training and knowledge expertise provided by Roy gave us competitive advantage over other firms and increased our ability to participate in cross-border projects," said Bianor CEO Nikolay Rashev via e-mail. "We also expect forthcoming benefits in the areas of company process development and maturity, as well as profitability and market expansion."
Porter is the manager of process management at the information and technical services division of Northrop Grumman. He has been working with software engineering for over 20 years.