Staying Ahead of the Competition: How CMMI Can Help

“Using the model further, the risk management process allowed us to categories and prioritize the risks attendant with each suggestion and determine a specific strategy,” Greer explains. “Quarterly releases were an industry standard, so the delivery schedule had to be maintained. Using more highly skilled resources would have resulted in greater costs and, consequently, reduced profits, a non-starter with senior management. An abbreviated process had the potential for allowing more defects to be delivered and therefore was rejected as a possible solution. The option of slightly reducing the functionality included with each release met all criteria and was ultimately the strategy selected.”

CMMI is intended as a means of ensuring that an organization is implementing and maintaining best practices that have been developed and proven over time. Organizations that follow their own best practices during times of high stress can avoid missed delivery dates, budget overruns, and poor quality deliverables and will be equipped to make better decisions and recover more quickly than organizations that make hasty decisions due to lack of the essential elements of effective processes.

Benefits of CMMI

Simply put, the key benefits that can be realized through implementing CMMI as a process improvement approach are as follows:

• If you have effective, proven processes in place, you will deliver quality products and/or services.
• Satisfied customers will bring repeat business and referrals, contributing to improvement of your bottom line.
• Increased efficiency will benefit the company financials, as you accomplish more for less money.
• Organizational risk is reduced, with less chance that money and other resources will need to be spent to bail out a failing project.

The Future of CMMI

Greer notes that the Software CMM (CMMI’s predecessor) was originally developed to aid in the development of complex software systems. “When other CMMIs were released, they needed a name, and people started referring to the additional ones as constellations,” he says. CMMI for Acquisition was recently released to support organizations whose main business model includes the acquisition and integration of products and services from a third-party vendor that is to be further refined and delivered to a client (supply chain management, acquisition, and outsourcing processes in government and industry). CMMI for Services, only released in draft form so far, addresses the guidance for delivering services within an organization and to external customers. Regardless of the model implemented, the unique business objectives should be considered and the CMMI best practices should be adapted to the individual organization in order to realize the greatest benefit from the improvement initiative.

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