The New CMMI Model Viewer - First Impressions

The CMMI Model Viewer was first released in March 2018 to coincide with the launch of CMMI V2.0. This represented a significant change in the way that the model content was accessed and used, and for the first time an annual license fee was levied for people wishing to access the model. Prior to that, CMMI Model content had been delivered through freely available PDF files and large hardback books.

Despite the fact that it was accompanied by a usage fee, the online viewer was a very positive step forward in accessing and using the CMMI model content. Since its first release the viewer has remained more or less the same for the last 8 years. Although significantly more convenient than the lengthy documents it largely replaced, the CMMI viewer, was not without its faults.

It had a somewhat primitive user interface, demanding unexpected and needless user action (e.g. the need to press an ‘Apply’ button whenever you changed views) and lacked important functionality that was promised by the CMMI training courses but never delivered in the model content (e.g. customisable views).

This week, the CMMI Institute launched (somewhat abruptly) a significant update to the model viewer. This blog post captures my first impressions of the viewer and how it compares with the previous one. Note: It is early days and I am still exploring the capabilities of the new viewer, so what follows may not be 100% authoritative. They are the personal views of myself following my initial exploration of the new viewer.

Overall Look and Feel

The two versions are visually very noticeably different:

The new version appears generally cleaner, fresher and better laid out than the previous system. The toolbars and branding have been condensed to take up far less screen real estate providing more space for model content to be visible, although this is offset somewhat by the amount of white-space separating on-screen elements.

The switch from a serif style font to a more modern, cleaner sans-serif one instantly makes the viewer appear more visually neutral.

The basic colour scheme is broadly the same and is ‘on-brand’ for the CMMI Institute default colour palette, but the main viewer screen has much more contrast making the component parts far more noticeable.

Navigation Menu

The Navigation menu on the left is more complex than in the old viewer but only because the old ‘light blue’ section menu bar has been removed and most of its content (Overview, Appendices and Glossary) has been moved into it. This makes the navigation menu more reminiscent of a document style index.

The Release Notes section has been moved into the ‘Help’ menu at the top of the viewer and the old model PDF/ E-Reader download button has disappeared (more on that later).

In the old viewer, if you tried to open up the Overview, Appendices or Glossary sections, a new tab would be created which forced you to switch between tabs. Now, these menu options open a sub-window in the same tab rather than populating the main viewer space. I personally find this a minor improvement over the tabbed approach but would have preferred it to have used the main viewer space for consistency - but that may be simply a matter of personal preference.  Along with the main model content, the additional informative material looks much cleaner and feels less like an afterthought.

You also have an option to ‘collapse’ the side menu to maximise the screen space for the main model content which is a useful improvement and there are buttons to fully expand or contract the practice areas to show all practices or just the PA titles.

A couple of other really useful additions are a text filter on the Navigation bar which enables you to filter out items based on an entered string. Hence if you enter ‘PLAN’ into the filter, you will get everything that contains the word PLAN. This filter works on all levels of the navigation bar so in the above example, if you have a fully contracted navigation bar (i.e. just the PA names) it will show you all PAs that have practices with the text 'PLAN' in them, not just the Planning practice area. The filter is not case sensitive.

There is also a really useful little checkbox marked ‘Highlight content at the selected level’ which if you tick this will highlight the PAs that contain content at the selected practice group level (the selected level being determined by the ‘Level’ drop down in the top menu). So, if you want to see all the Practice areas that have Level 4 practices for example, set the level drop down to 4 and check that box and they will be highlighted in the navigation bar.

The final flourish on the Navigation bar is the addition of a ‘My Content’ section which promises to be a huge improvement and which will be discussed in details later.

Top Menus

The upper menus have been significantly reworked. In the old viewer, the CMMI Logo commanded an extraordinary amount of screen space, making the menu area far bigger than it needed to be and wasting a lot of the available screen space. In the new viewer it has been constrained somewhat to the top left corner. Pretty much the same size as before and arguably more prominent but taking up far less real estate overall.

There are still buttons for the CMMI Dashboard and to logout (I have yet to ever use this button on either viewer!).

Previously, the ‘Help’ button took you to the ISACA support desk; now the button still exists but it has a menu built into it with options for ISACA Support, a guided tour, FAQs and release notes. The Guided tour is shown to you by default when you first fire up the new viewer, but if you ever need a refresher, you can access it here. The release notes menu option removes the old light blue button from the old model.

There is a language selection dropdown. Currently on my viewer I only have the option for English. I suspect other language version will become available in due course for those that need them. The final button on this top menu is a new one called ‘Go offline’.This may take a little more exploration to fully review but my initial impressions are favourable.

In the old viewer, originally, you were given the option to download a PDF version of the model to use in the event of the online viewer going down for any reason. This also had the dual benefit of giving license holders a lifetime copy of the model even beyond the expiry of your viewer license (albeit not updatable).

Last year the basic PDF version was removed and replaced by the less reliable ‘E-Reader’ version. Although far less accessible than the PDF this enabled the CMMI Institute to apply license timeouts to both the online and offline versions of the model.

The E-Reader downloaded itself into your browser’s cache so even if there was no internet connection, you could still access the cached content (in theory). However it didn't really work that well for all users (presumably those whose devices had security lockdowns limiting browser cache activity). 

This new version claims to integrate online and offline modes. I am unclear of the mechanism employed here and time will tell how functional the offline version really is, however MY initial use has been quite good.

When you first select the ‘Go-Offline’ button, the top menu bar goes brown and a message appears next to the CMMI Institute logo saying ‘currently offline’. Other than that, my initial explorations have given me no other hint that anything is really different. The graphic heavy appendices appear instantly and fully and I seem to be able to browse the model content unrestricted. So far so good, but I will reserve full judgement until I see how other people get on with it and I’ve had a chance to test it more thoroughly.

Underneath the top menu is the secondary menu which provides controls to filter the model content. In the old version, there were three main dropdowns for ‘Views’, ‘Levels’ and ‘Context’ and these were very ‘clunky’. For example, In the default view, the dropdowns were set to ‘All’ views, ‘Level 5’ for Levels and ‘All’ Contexts. If I was only interested in Level 3 practices, I would expect to be able to select ‘Level 3’ from the drop down and then only content up to practice group level 3 would be displayed. However, in the old model you couldn’t select anything other than Level 5 on the default settings. Thankfully the new version removes this limitation and instantly this menu becomes useful.

The Context dropdown is used to select which additional context information would be displayed in the model. Context information is additional explanatory information that helps to provide additional guidance on how a practice area and its practices might be expressed or implemented in different specific working contexts (e.g. Agile Development). In the old menu, you had the option to select any one context or all of them which was incredibly frustrating if (for example) you were working in a development organization that wanted access to the Development, Agile Development, and DevSecOps context content. You could have one of the specific context or ALL contexts but not a subset.  Now, the drop down has a proper tickbox approach so you can select exactly what context information you want to see.

Finally the Model View drop down provided you with access to all of the CMMI Institute predefined model views (collections of specific practice areas). There were three types of predefined views in the old viewer: Domain model views (which show all core practice areas plus the domain specific ones applicable to the selected domain), Capability Areas (which are collections of related practice areas united by a common theme  such as ‘Ensuring Quality’) and special case views (of which the only current instance is the MDDAP view). Previously, these were all grouped together into the drop down, differentiated purely by ordering in the list and naming conventions. Now, there are subgroupings which can be expanded and contracted to highlight the different types, which is another helpful convenience.

One disappointment with the new Views menu is that you are still only able to select one view at a time. So if you were working on both the Service and Development domains, it would be useful if you could select both from this drop down (in the way that you now can for context information) and the viewer would provide you with all PAs, Core, Service Specific and Development specific. This feels like an easy fix and as we shall see, you can now easily create your own customised view to do exactly this if you so wish, but it just feels like a lost opportunity.

The other big difference (and very welcome change) is that the old ‘Apply’ button has been removed! The viewer now responds to any changes in the filtering dropdowns immediately and without prompting or manual intervention.

Along with the filtering dropdowns, this second menu bar also provides access to a fully integrated search function. No longer do you have to select the easily overlooked ‘search’ button at the top of the screen and effectively go to a separate page to search; now you just start typing into the search box and the viewer will dynamically display search results as you type. There is also a check box to limit the search to filtered content only rather than the full model.

The final element on this menu bar, and another new and welcome addition, is a button to access your own bookmarked pages. As you work through the model and find pages that you want to return to, you can click the bookmark icon on them and they will be added to your own personal list of bookmarks which can be accessed from this button. This is a very useful additional feature but unfortunately it appears to only apply to the main model content (i.e. PAs and Practices) and not to the other informative material such as the appendices and overview sections. Hence, whilst it is useful, it falls somewhat short of the facility that was already available in the old PDF copy of the model.

Support for User Specific Content

As discussed above, you can now bookmark specific pages and maintain a personal set of direct links to them. The bookmarks can be accessed off the filter menu bar, but there is also a new addition to the navigation menu called ‘My Content’ where you can also find a list of your bookmarked pages.

In addition to bookmarks, there are two other types of user defined content that the model viewer now supports.

Firstly: Notes. On every PA or practice page, a little floating clipboard icon appears and if you click on it, a simple editor will open up where you can create notes of your own relating to the content being viewed.

Whenever you subsequently land on a page that has notes associated with it, the clipboard icon has a little red dot on it to indicate the presence of a note. These notes can also be viewed in the ‘Notes’ tab of the ‘My Content’ area.

The final addition is the long-awaited addition of ‘Customised Views’. This feature has been referred to in the training material since the browser was first released, but the online viewer never included functionality to support it so it remained a great idea that was never really more than an abstract concept. Now there is SOME functionality to support limited customised views. And in fairness, it seems to work quite well.

When you first go into the ‘Customised Views’ tab of the ‘My Content’ section, you are faced with a dialogue that you can use to create your own view. Earlier I noted the inability for you to select multiple views from the views dropdown, so you could not select (say) the Development and Services views from the dropdown at the same time. However, you can create this as a customized view very easily.

First enter a name for your view. Then you can populate your custom view by basing it on existing views, so in the example discussed above, if you click on the ‘Populate from Model Views’  drop down and check ‘Development’ and ‘Services’ and then choose the Level that you are interested in (Say level 5 to catch everything), a ‘Populate’ button is enabled which when pressed will bring in all the PAs from both selected views (17 core, 2 Development and 4 Services – totalling 23 PAs).

At this point, if you so wish, you can then switch in or out individual PAs and once you are happy, you can click the ‘Save’ button and your custom view will be saved and visible in your list of custom views. If you now go to the Model View dropdown discussed previously, you will see that there is a new grouping called ‘My Custom Views’ and your new view is listed and selectable.

This is an incredibly helpful feature and will probably satisfy most people’s need to create their own views.

Other Observations

The launch of the new model viewer coincides with the release of the new AI model content, as indicated in the release notes. The glossary now contains a lot of AI related definitions and material which is slightly odd given that the rest of the AI content is not visible.

The CMMI Institute has now instigated a ‘tiered’ approach to accessing model content and it seems you can only access the AI content if you have attended the associated AI training course. From the release notes it appears that most AI content has been added in the form of an additional AI context.

The new site looks good on a laptop but rendering on a phone was less successful. Whilst it maintained a consistent overall look, the available screen space for the content window was too small to be of practical use. Perhaps a dedicated CMMI App might be a useful option.

Summary

Overall, the new model viewer appears to be a significant improvement over the previous version. As well as a much-needed refresh and facelift, it includes valuable new features which will genuinely make it more useful for all users. Whilst not perfect, this feels like a positive step forward and will hopefully make engaging with the CMMI content much easier and more effective.

To learn more about the CMMI Model viewer and for a comprehensive introduction to the CMMI itself the Building Organizational Capability course covers the entire model and is a necessary pre-requisite for students looking to take the new AI training courses. You may also find our high level Introduction to CMMI material useful.