Background
Over 16 years working with software development companies to implement the
CMM/CMMI. Experience includes appraising small companies and large corporations worldwide. A practical and common sense thought process is used: it must make business sense for the company, and must be easy for company personnel to use. This philosophy makes implementing a process improvement program painless and long lasting.
Continuous Process Monitoring Model
A frustration is the fact the many companies game the system to obtain a CMMI maturity level in order to bid on proposals. After receiving their maturity level, they stop following processes, which does not benefit them or their client. After considerable thought and discussion with other process improvement professionals, it is my belief that most companies fail to continue to use the CMMI is because it is too big and takes too many resources to maintain. For example, there are 152 Development practices and 156 Service practices to obtain maturity level 3. I believe this is overwhelming to many companies to maintain.
I have created a lean version of the CMMI that includes just 32 processes, which covers the full software development lifecycle. These processes are contained in ManageHub and have been reviewed by The Baldrige Alliance for Performance Excellence.
Approach
The first step is to baseline your current processes. Regardless of what you are doing now you are following some kind of processes, documented or not. I will review all your processes and map them to my process model. The goal is to identify what processes are currently being used and if they are good processes. Good processes are ones that people of a similar skill set can follow and produce similar results. Process teams identified in ManageHub will collaborate to create and improve processes. This way the users will feel ownership of the processes and will much more likely continue to use and improve their processes. I will work with each process team to ensure processes are detailed and complete enough to ensure efficient and quality work. I will continue to monitor processes and project artifacts to encourage continuous process improvement.