Over the years the CMMI journey for a number of organizations has been very successful leading to higher customer satisfaction and ensuring the business continues to remain at the forefront as a leader in quality and performance.
The new version brings with it an integrated product suite, CMMI V2.0, which aligns business goals directly with operations and capabilities to drive measurable improved performance in terms of time, quality, budget, customer satisfaction and other key drivers. New model of CMMI thrusts the principle such as "Performance drives Process Improvements" than "Improvements in Processes will improve Performance". CMMI insists on ROI (Return on Investment) for efforts and resources invested in improving organizations capabilities. There is a welcome change in the new model. Language is simple to understand and it is very well organized. I liked the content organized as:
- Categories
- Capability Areas
- Practice Areas
- Practices
Once you understand this configuration it is quite simple and easy to place various aspects of CMMI 2.0 in your business context.
Let us explore all these components of CMMI, one by one.
Category - These are defined as logical groups or views. These logical groups or views represent related Capability Areas, which if worked on can help resolve problems faced in producing or delivering business solutions.
A typical performance improvement path expressed by CMMI is "Do task or execute", "Manage execution to improve efficiency", "Enable this execution for better results or effectiveness" and "Improve to enhance performance. That means these logical groups are divided in 4 categories such as:
Doing - This category consists of capability areas and related practice areas for producing and delivering quality solutions.
Managing - Capability areas and Practice areas having focus on planning and management of solution implementation.
Enabling - Execution requires support. This category has capability and practice areas to support implementation and delivery of the solutions.
Improving - Challenge in front of the organizations is to sustain and improve performance levels. Capability and practice areas in this category provide guidance to sustain and improve performance.
Let us understand this entirely different lifecycle that CMMI presents in front of us. All these years we have talked about PDCA - Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle. CMMI has tweaked and presented it in a new way.
Organizations can't exist unless they have capability in
"Doing" - Deliver solutions to clients. These are first level organizations which are able to deliver and stay afloat in the business environment. Most startups fall in this category.
If these startups have a dream to survive for a very long time, they need to focus on other categories too.
"Managing" - Organizations must focus on improving efficiency of the actions to deliver solutions. Inefficiency will hit the bottom line and make you irrelevant in the long run. Managing actions for efficiency is essential for the organizations.
"Enabling" - Results are important. To achieve results consistently, organizations need to support the implementation. This unwavering support ensures results or effectiveness of the execution. Practice areas and practices in the "Enabling" category provide guidance to the organizations on the actions to be taken to ensure effectiveness.
"Improving" - If you do what you did last year, you will get what you got or less than that. Status Quo can kill the spirit of the organization. Status Quo brings in complacency. Customer expectations are not static. Unless organizations search for new avenues to enhance efficiency and effectiveness, meet and exceed customer expectations on a continual basis, survival will be difficult for them. "Improving" category consists of practice areas and practices that direct organizations to the methodologies for carrying out improvements. Continuous improvements are key to survival and excel in this ruthless competitive world.
I will throw more light on practice areas under these categories in my next blog. Needless to say, I will start writing about my most favorite practice area in the blog after that. Till then stay tuned.
