While their husbands progressed through their own formation program, these women helped one another accept and live their newly acquired role in the Church as deacons' wives.

This book is an engaging and accessible collection that celebrates the nuance and depth of student-faculty partnerships in higher education. It aims to break the mold of traditional and power-laden academic writing by showcasing creative genres such as reflection, poetry, dialogue, interview, vignette, and essay. The collection has invited chapters from renowned scholars in the field alongside new student and staff voices, and it reflects and embodies a wide range of student-staff partnership perspectives from different roles, identities, cultures, countries, and institutions.

"In this book, I have found answers to key questions and misconceptions about the relationship between Six Sigma and the Capability Maturity Model Integration [CMMI]....Among my key takeaways is that the relationship between Six Sigma and CMMI exemplifies one of the principles of S4/IEE: CMMI provides process infrastructure that is needed to support a successful Six Sigma strategy." —Forrest W. Breyfogle III, CEO, Smarter Solutions, Inc. "Finally, a book that bridges the software and hardware process tool set. To date, there have been hardware and software engineers who for one reason or another have not communicated their process methods. And so, myths formed that convinced the hardware community that CMMI was only for software and likewise convinced the software community that Six Sigma was only for hardware. It is both refreshing and thought provoking to dispel these myths." —Jack Ferguson, Manager, SEI Appraisal Program, Software Engineering Institute CMMI and Six Sigma represent two of the best-known process improvement initiatives. Both are designed to enhance work quality and thereby produce business advantages for an organization. It's a misconception that the two are in competition and cannot be implemented simultaneously. Practitioners originally trained in either CMMI or Six Sigma are now finding that the two initiatives work remarkably well together in the pursuit of their common goal. CMMI® and Six Sigma: Partners in Process Improvement focuses on the synergistic, rather than competitive, implementation of CMMI and Six Sigma—with synergy translating to "faster, better, cheaper" achievement of mission success. Topics range from formation of the value proposition to specific implementation tactics. The authors illustrate how not taking advantage of what both initiatives have to offer puts an organization at risk of sinking time, energy, and money into "inventing" a solution that already exists. Along the way they debunk a few myths about Six Sigma applications in software. While the authors concentrate on the interoperability of Six Sigma and CMMI, they also recognize that organizations rarely implement only these two initiatives. Accordingly, the discussion turns to the emerging realm of "multimodel" process improvement and strategies and tactics that transcend models to help organizations effectively knit together a single unified internal process standard. Whether you work in the defense industry, for a commercial organization, or for a government agency—wherever quality and efficiency matter—you'll find this book to be a valuable resource for bridging process issues across domains and building an improvement strategy that succeeds.

Processes and Foundations for Virtual Organizations contains selected articles from PRO-VE'03, the Fourth Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Lugano, Switzerland in October 2003. This fourth edition includes a rich set of papers revealing the progress and achievements in the main current focus areas: -VO breeding environments; -Formation of collaborative networked organizations; -Ontologies and knowledge management; -Process models and interoperability; -Infrastructures; -Multi-agent approaches. In spite of many valid contributions in these areas, many research challenges remain. This is clearly stated in a number of papers suggesting a new research agenda and strategic research roadmaps for advanced virtual organizations. With the selected papers included in this book, PRO-VE pursues its double mission as a forum for presentation and discussion of achievements as well as a place to discuss and suggest new directions and research strategies.

In today's connected global marketplace, success and failure is bound up with the management of your inter-organisational partnerships. Competition is no longer between individual organisations but between alliances of companies and networks of supply chains. Richard Gibbs and Andrew Humphries provide a practical guide to the management process and skill sets needed for co-ordinating the business activities that are essential to creating a competitive advantage. Their eight partnership types developed from earlier research help readers adapt their relationship strategies to the different opportunities that present themselves and focus their greatest time and resources on the collaborations that offer the greatest value. The text includes an explanation of the context for collaboration, the principles and drivers for success, as well as techniques for appraisal and management. This is an excellent overview of the tools, techniques and philosophies behind an enterprise’s successful management of its strategically important relationships. Enterprise Relationship Management will help ensure your organisation has the requisite ability to form, manage, retire and exit partnerships in a fluid and agile way. Whether you are in sales or marketing or finance and operations, this book will show you how to get the most from your partnerships.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Abstract State Machines, ASM 2004, held in Lutherstadt Wittenberg, Germany, in May 2004. The 12 revised full research papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers reflect state-of-the-art research and development of the abstract state machine method for the design and analysis of complex software and hardware systems. Besides theoretical results and methodological progress, applications in various fields are studied as well.