CMMI - a process improvement model for software and technology organisations.
To be successful in today's competitive environment, organisations must constantly endeavour to improve their processes and reduce inefficiencies to cut costs.
Lately, in the pursuit of process excellence, a trend of achieving improvements based on process models has been witnessed in manufacturing industries. Some of the popular quality models/standards used by the manufacturing sector include ISO 9001:2000 (International Organisation for Standardisation), Kaizen, and Six Sigma. Software and technology sectors are catching up with their own set of models such as TickIT, ITIL* (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and CMMI* (Capability Maturity Model Integration). Consequently, adopting process improvement models is fast becoming a norm across various industries.
One of the widely adopted models in the software and systems engineering sector is the CMMI model, which has been developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Carnegie Mellon University, US.
The CMMI is a versatile process improvement framework that can be used across industry sectors. However, higher adoption of CMMI has been observed in the software and systems development sectors (such as aircraft, cars and electronics).
CMMI is a collection of best practices that allows organisations to effectively meet their business objectives.
Like the ISO 9001:2000 standard, the CMMI model also provides a framework of expected practices to achieve continual process improvements. However, the added advantage is in its flexibility, by allowing the organisation to tailor the requirements of the model to better meet business objectives.
CMMI provides an organisation the flexibility to approach the process improvement initiative from two angles: an organisational maturity approach (staged representation) and the other, a process capability approach (continuous representation). The staged representation helps the organisation gradually develop process maturity by laying a foundation of basic practices and then building on them by adding advanced practices. Whereas the continuous representation is intended for organisations
that feel the need to focus and build process capability on specific areas.
CMMI is widely used and practiced in the US, Europe and Japan and has become a standard process improvement model used by most of the Indian IT industry. The adoption of the CMMI model is catching on fast in countries such as Australia, China, Brazil, Egypt and the Philippines.
Organisations in the Middle East are already on their way to achieving process improvements by adopting the CMMI model and a few have achieved significant milestones by preparing themselves for the initial appraisals.
(*CMMI is registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University
*ITIL is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is Registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office.
ISO is a registered trademark of International Organisation for Standardisation.
TickIT is a copyright of British Standards Institute)
- The writer is Advisor, IT Advisory Services, KPMG, UAE
