Staying Ahead of the Competition: How CMMI Can Help

Ensure your company doesn't find itself behind the eight ball in today's competitive marketplace. Learn how CMMI can help you stay ahead of the game!

“Many clients are increasingly requiring CMMI appraisals and ratings as criteria to bid for new business,” says David Greer, director of software process improvement for American Systems, one of the largest employee-owned companies in the U.S. headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. As a company that focuses on CMMI consulting, training, staffing, and appraisals, American Systems maintains that using the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) as a process improvement approach makes good business sense.

Which CMMI Model Is Best?
When working with clients, Greer’s company has the responsibility of determining which CMMI model the client company will follow: staged representation or continuous representation. In the staged representation model, there are preselected business process areas that should be covered first. Clients build on one stage to the next stage. There are four levels in this model: 2, 3, 4, and 5. Those organizations that have an appraisal and fail it are placed on Level 1.

In the continuous representation model, there are six levels: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. In this model, a Level 1 placement indicates that the company did what was required, but didn’t have good strategies for estimating or staffing. Levels 2, 3, 4, and 5 represent the same designation in both models.

Financial Benefits
American Systems recommends CMMI to its clients because it can yield a phenomenal return on investment. In the software business, costs typically are organized into a number of categories (e.g., cost, schedule, productivity, quality, customer satisfaction, ROI), which are collectively referred to as “business value.” The business value of CMMI has remained relatively stable at 4:1; that is, if you invest $1.00 in CMMI-based process improvement, you will realize a $4.00 return in value. For nearly 20 years, companies implementing the approach have been seeing these positive results.

“Rather than replace existing business practices, CMMI serves to categorize and organize business practices for efficient access and utilization,” Greer adds. “The model is designed to address the major components of running an organization, including managing business-related processes, technology-related processes, and projects. CMMI also describes an infrastructure within which projects can be managed and executed, as well as interfaces with other external partners.” Project planning encompasses the creation of schedules, budgets, task lists, risk identification, and resource requests and the execution of specific functions that convert input into output according to defined standards for producing results that can be profitably sold to clients.

Is CMMI for Everyone?
Greer believes that CMMI can generally be a good fit for any organization developing a product or providing a service. Ultimately, all projects have a set of defined requirements that must be met within a framework of development practices, schedule, cost, and quality. “This is all accomplished by tracking progress, making small adjustments along the way, collecting data, and managing all the smaller sub-projects,” he says. “For this reason, CMMI is applicable for a very wide range of organizations.”

While success with a CMMI initiative is not specifically dependent on the size of the organization, Greer notes that is does seem to be a more difficult undertaking for smaller organizations (with less than 25 employees) to manage the initial overhead associated with CMMI adoption. The overhead costs involved with developing the policies, processes, training, and other elements associated with CMMI may exceed the benefits of implementation for some of these companies. “The model does seem to be more valuable for large, complex projects,” he points out.