Official Introduction to CMMI (V1.3)

Many organizations around the world are using the CMMI to guide their process improvement activities but what is it and what can it do for you and your organization? In this section delegates are provided with an overview of the CMMI for Development and its relationships with other CMMI models.

Today, a single company usually does not develop all the components that compose a product or service. More commonly, some components are built in-house and some are acquired; then all the components are integrated into the final product. Here we will discuss what organizations must do to be able to manage and control this complex development and maintenance process.

Target Audience

The course will benefit product developers, process implementers and anyone interested in learning more about the CMMI. There are no pre-requisites for this course other than a general understanding of systems or software engineering.

Objectives

The objective is that by the end of the course the participants will have more than just a theoretical knowledge of CMM-DEV, they will be able to:

• Understand at a high level the CMMI Product Suite
• Be able to apply relevant information in the model for their organization
• Understand the key concepts about model structure and function, & model relationships
• Be aware of the components of the CMMI models
• Understand how they may be applied to their organization
• Apply CMMI principles to meet their organizations’ business objectives

Introduction to Class

• Familiarization with course material
• Familiarization with the protocols and timings
• Expectation setting and clarifications

Process Improvement Concepts & CMMI
Everyone realizes the importance of having a motivated, quality work force and the latest technology, but even the finest people can’t perform at their best when the process is not understood or operating at its best. This module introduces the delegates to process improvement concepts, the CMMI product suite and the business benefits that can be achieved with a CMMI-based process improvement program.

Overview of the CMMI for Development
Many organizations around the world are using the CMMI to guide their process improvement activities but what is it and what can it do for you and your organization? In this section delegates are provided with an overview of the CMMI for Development and its relationships with other CMMI models.

Defining and Engineering the Product
Today, a single company usually does not develop all the components that compose a product or service. More commonly, some components are built in-house and some are acquired; then all the components are integrated into the final product. Here we will discuss what organizations must do to be able to manage and control this complex development and maintenance process.

Topics include:

• Developing and managing requirements and ensuring they are satisfied
• Designing the product and its components
• Managing the interfaces among the components and products
• Building the components
• Integrating the components to form the product
• Delivering the product

Ensuring Product Success
Whilst defining and engineering the product it is essential to ensure that what is built will meet the needs of the customers and end users. This section looks at ways in which this can be done both proactively and during the development lifecycle.

It includes:

• Identifying and managing risks and taking appropriate mitigation actions when necessary
• Verifying that the product is aligned with the relevant specifications
• Validating that the product will actually perform as the end users expect

Managing and Monitoring the Development
Many problems experienced by projects and organizations; e.g. late delivery, overspent budget, poor product quality, inefficient delivery, do not usually have a single cause. They are a direct result of the organization’s practices and cultural behavior. These are not things a project manager can fix.

This part of the course includes:

• Estimating the scope and work that needs to be performed
• Developing mechanisms to acquire identified products
• Developing a project plan
• Getting commitments to the plan
• Monitoring progress against the plan
• Taking action to address significant deviations from the plan

Making Work Explicit and Measurable
A measurement capability that supports the information needs of the business is essential. When organizations begin their improvement journey they need to understand what they need to know to be able to manage the business, how to collect and analyze data, and how to make sure that the results of the measurement activities are communicated to those who need the data for decision making.
As organizations mature they enhance their measurement capability to enable them not only to record past events but also to predict future performance based on analyzing historical data. Here we will consider basic measurement practices (identifying information needs, defining measurements, etc.) and then how a basic measurement capability can be enhanced to allow data-based decision making and to enable process predictability and consistency through the removal of process variation.

Managing Decisions and Suppliers
Additional activities that support and add value are addressed in this section. There are practices for formal decision making for those important decisions, and techniques for identifying, selecting, and working with suppliers when acquiring products and services.

Creating a Culture to Sustain Excellence
The practices considered up to this point support the development and delivery of effective products. But there needs to be an infrastructure that monitors the use of processes, and supports and encourages their continuing improvement.

Here we will look at:

• How the use of processes and standards can be monitored?
• Establishing and maintaining a repository of processes, lifecycles, etc. and making them available for use.
• How project management can become a key part of the process improvement infrastructure.
• Providing a structured approach to process improvement and ensuring the deployment of processes.
• Identifying and delivering training to meet the organization’s strategic needs.

Process Institutionalisation
Usually an organization’s investment in process is considerable and never without a lot of blood, sweat and tears from those charged with developing and implementing the processes. So why is it that so often processes are not used by those they were created for?

This section offers a framework for enabling processes to be deployed in an effective way that helps to make them usable, relevant to the business, manageable, measureable and, above all, allows them to change as the business changes.

Appraisals and Representations
It is beneficial to develop process capability and organizational maturity and then to evaluate (‘appraise’ in CMMI terminology) progress.

This section looks at the CMMI appraisal approach and the benefits it can bring to an organization undertaking a process improvement programme, provides a summary of two approaches to process improvement using the CMMI; the first is a pre-defined roadmap for improvement the second is a flexible approach focusing on particular sets of practices.