Whilst there is no one single approach that will necessarily yield a positive outcome for all organizations, the historical evidence from 25 years of improvement across a diverse set of organizations and industry sectors has revealed an approach that has proven to be generally effective for most organizations looking to adopt CMMI as a prime pillar in the continuous improvement efforts. This information has been collected together into an Adoption guide which can be downloaded from the CMMI Institute website at:
Sounds like CMMI might be useful - but where do we start?
This guide outlines a 6 stage process for organizations new to CMMI to learn about the model, carry out a gap analysis and build the improvement program with CMMI at the heart of it.
​The basic adoption process breaks down as follows:
Firstly, undertake some training to learn about CMMI and – crucially – how it might be useful to your organization. CMMI is a well established process improvement framework that offers many options for improving the processes of your organization but a basic understanding of the model and what it covers is important when planning how to implement it within your specific business context.
Step 2 is to identify what you are hoping to achieve through using the CMMI by setting some performance and process improvement goals for your organization. Process improvement initiatives tend to be far more successful if they are targeted appropriately. CMMI enables you to target your improvement actions and focus your attention where it is likely to have most benefit.
The next stage is to conduct a mapping activity to see how the practices of the CMMI relate to the processes that are in use within your organization. This can be done in a number of different ways but one of the quickest and most effective approaches is to conduct an initial ‘Evaluation’ appraisal. This type of approach will give you a clear set of improvement opportunities and objectives as well as an initial mapping of your business processes to the practices in CMMI.
Once a set of improvement opportunities have been identified, these can then be turned into an improvement plan and the work can commence on addressing the identified issues.
Making the necessary adjustments to the organization’s processes is just the first part of the story. CMMI expects processes to nbe ‘persistent and habitual’ in their usage which means that new or updated processes need to be properly rolled-out and deployed and allowed time to ‘bed-in’ so that they can become the ‘normal’ way of working for the organization
Once the new or revised processes have been established for some time, the organization may then elect to undergo a more formal CMMI ‘Benchmark’ appraisal. A benchmark appraisal is the mechanism that is used to generate ratings against the model and hence enable a ‘Maturity Level’ to be formally recognised. For many organizations, achievement of a Maturity Level represents one of the main objectives for their improvement program.
