Evaluating CMMI: When is it a Good Fit?

By ExecutiveBrief Staff

What's the best way to identify and implement process improvement for your business? Gain the knowledge you need to determine if CMMI will fit the bill!

Many enterprises fully appreciate the business value in assessing their progress through a program that delivers a measurable maturity or capability rating. In the improvement of business processes ranging from software development to project management, this effort can be accomplished by instituting the Capability Maturity Model Integration, or CMMI.

What Is CMMI?
Current CMMI best practices are published in documents called models, which each address a different area of business processes: 1) product and service development and 2) supply chain management, including acquisition and outsourcing. According to the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), in each case, CMMI contributes to the interaction of traditionally separate organizational functions as well as to set process improvement goals and generally guides the quality process. In software or product development, a business must ask itself, what’s not working with our current way of developing wares? Decision makers must have a clear answer to this question in order to understand how the CMMI model can be applied.

Why CMMI?
The business model weighs in as a primary consideration. CMMI will be a must if your business is involved in product development for federal agencies, or if you are a subcontractor to a federal agency’s primary contractor. If this is your customer base, CMMI may well come up in the request for proposal (RFP).

If this is not your principal customer base, you may need more justification for implementing a process improvement program. According to Bill Smith, president and principal consultant at Leading Edge Process Consultants of Vienna, Virginia, and veteran SEI-authorized CMMI instructor, “CMMI forces the business to think long and hard about business objectives. Organizations X, Y, and Z have differing business priorities,” he says. If time to market, for example, is a priority, it will become one of the business objectives addressed in your CMMI-based improvement effort.

But clarifying business objectives isn’t the only advantage of CMMI. As Smith notes, “When applied correctly, it helps the business to operate better, cheaper, and faster, and it reduces risk.”