For the past two decades, the number of organizations implementing maturity models has steadily increased. While the initial adopters were the large defense, aerospace, and telecommunications corporations, as the benefits of using models like the CMM and now the CMMI were demonstrated and recognized by industry, other smaller organizations followed suit. Of course, with this increased demand, there is also an increased emphasis in implementing the models and appraising organizations with fewer than twenty-six people.
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) publishes a Maturity Profile twice yearly (March and September) that contains information on appraisal results. More specifically, this document showcases all appraisal results reported over the previous six months – as well as the total number of appraisals reported. As of September 2008, approximately 3000 CMMI appraisals have been conducted and reported since 2004. The data in the graph depicts a continued increase - although the slope of the trend changes from report to report.
When we analyze this information for small organizations (<25 people), we see similar trends, but at a much higher rate.
In fact, the percentage of small organizations compared to the total of all reported appraisals has recently increased as well.
Consequently, it is increasingly important for small organizations to understand the implications, benefits, and challenges that are associated with implementing the CMMI.
Since I personally worked with a number of small organizations recently, I found it very interesting that many of the challenges faced by small organizations are similar to those challenges faced by much larger organizations. In fact, from a macroscopic view, the argument can be made that there is no difference at all between implementing the CMMI in a small setting and a large organization. Both large and small organizations face the following same challenges:
- Lack of management commitment
- Lack of planning
- Difficulty with defining and documenting processes and process assets
- Limited to no training provided
- Misunderstanding of Measurement and Analysis (MA)
- Misunderstanding of Process and Product Quality Assurance (PPQA)
- Unrealistic expectations for an appraisal
All that said, the uniqueness of a small organizational setting becomes obvious when you start examining each of these challenges in more detail. In a small organization, there typically is one Project Manager wearing multiple hats. Additionally, the organization is resource constrained and thus, an already heavily committed team needs to take on additional PPQA and Configuration Management (CM) roles. Additionally, many of the processes are embedded in the team and so, the workers find it odd that they need to document a process that seems almost second nature to them. Furthermore, when they do document their processes to be CMMI compliant, they tend to over-engineer the processes and in turn, create an overly cumbersome product.
