Week 8: CMMI - Performance Measure System

Many organizations throughout the world have invested in CMMI-based process improvement. Many of these organizations have achieved and sometimes surpassed their improvement goals. The achievement of process capability and maturity level goals is an important benchmark of success; however, it is not enough. Organizations undertake process improvement to achieve business-related performance goals.

There now is ample evidence that process improvement using the CMMI Product Suite can result in marked improvements in schedule and cost performance, product quality, return on investment, and other measures of performance outcome. This document summarizes much of the publicly available empirical evidence about the performance results that can occur as a consequence of CMMI-based process improvement.

Organizations differ in their business goals and strategic objectives as well as the products and services that they provide. They differ in how they implement CMMI-based process improvement and in the ways they measure their resulting progress and performance.

The performance measures are classified into six broad categories for this report. As shown in the detail in Figure 1, potential benefits of process improvement might accrue with respect to cost, schedule, productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction. The sixth category is return on investment and related measures, as shown in the bottom box. Improvements in the six categories can contribute to additional business goals, for example, market share, reduced time to market, lower cost products, and higher quality products.

The SEI's Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®) helps organizations increase the maturity of their processes to improve long-term business performance. Results show that CMMI often leads to very impressive improvements in product quality, project performance and organizational performance.

The CMMI Measurement and Analysis (M&A) process area, which spans both software measurement and process improvement practices, enables and promotes decision-making using data analysis that is based on objective measurement. Measurement provides information that improves decision making in time to affect the business or mission outcome.

Manual effort spent laboriously gathering and shifting through raw data, performing analysis by hand, creating and distributing graphs and reports is time and money wasted.

We can achieve solutions to match the specific and growing needs of companies operating at all maturity and capability levels of the CMMI, from Level 2 through to Level 5.

It is not only easy to implement the CMMI measurement and analysis practices, but can we can track our project, program or company's compliance against the CMMI key process areas.

Case study : CMMI in a Microteam