Process Improvement with CMMI v1.2 and ISO Standards

Boris Mutafelija, Harvey Stromberg

• Publisher: Auerbach Publications
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781420052831
• eBook ISBN: 9781000687460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Operations
• Index: Business

In this age of globalization, process improvement practitioners must be able to comprehend and work with the different standards and frameworks used around the world. While many systems and software engineering organizations rely on a single standard as the primary driver of process improvement efforts (CMMI-based process improvement in the U.S. an

Chapter 1

Introduction

Companies that survive, thrive, and grow are constantly changing and improving. Change is often easiest to implement when improvements are guided by existing roadmaps or standards. This sounds straightforward in principle, but there are so many standards out there! Selecting the right standard can be baffling and the number of choices leads to many questions, among them:

■ Which standard should be selected?

■ What if more than one standard seems to fit the company’s needs?

■ What if no single standard addresses all needs?

■ What should be done when some standards address our business needs but others are required by customers?

■ If multiple standards are selected, should any one of them be chosen as the primary driver for process definition and improvement?

In many businesses, an organization’s compliance to the requirements of a given standard will be formally evaluated and measured. Achievement of a specified level of compliance is often required by customers and may be an important driver for process improvement. Two prominent frameworks frequently used for compliance assessments are ISO 9001:2000, for quality management, and CMMI v1.2, for systems and software engineering process improvement. The ISO 20000:2005 standard, with its strong relationship to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), is also emerging as a frequently used compliance framework. Another category of standards is composed of structured collections of best practices. Among the standards in that category are:

■ ISO 15288, for defining systems engineering life cycle processes

■ ISO 12207, for defining software life cycle processes

■ ISO 90003, for applying ISO 9001 to software

In fact, grouping standards this way (compliance frameworks vs. best practices collections) is not strictly accurate. Although ISO 9001 and CMMI are frequently selected for formal assessments, both are valuable as sources of best practices. Similarly, the standards listed as collections of best practices can serve as the reference models in assessments. Overlaps among standards are inevitable because they were developed independently, under different schedules, and had different sponsoring groups. Even though those overlaps may pose problems during implementation, they exhibit synergy. It is this synergy that we explore in this book. This book will show how to implement, manage, and sustain process improvement, guided by an integrated application of the appropriate standards.

We will present some of the widely used fundamental concepts of process improvement including discussion of enablers and barriers to process improvement, highlights of popular process improvement approaches, and topics to consider when using multiple frameworks. The main features and purpose of each standard discussed in this book are summarized. We also discuss the changes from CMMI v1.1 to CMMI v1.2 and efforts to align and harmonize multiple standards.

We then bring the multiple elements together, showing how to exploit the similarities and differences among the standards and capitalize on their synergy. We also discuss how the objective evidence needed to measure conformance to multiple standards may be efficiently created, organized, and presented.

Finally, we show the multiple relationships among the standards at a detailed requirement level. In general, these relationships, or maps, are “many-to-many,” meaning that a requirement in one standard may correspond to more than one requirement in another standard, and vice versa. Also, the detailed relationships vary in their strength or degree of correspondence.

These relationships become important both when developing and implementing a process improvement strategy and during appraisals. Because the real needs of the business must be the drivers for improvement, the domains of each framework, their areas of overlap, and their differing approaches must be understood so the frameworks can be effectively and efficiently integrated. An organization’s quality management system or set of standard processes must be designed to serve the needs of the organization and not merely to address the requirements of one or more standards.

Audits and appraisals are expensive and time consuming. An organization seeking certification or appraisal against more than one framework can realize significant returns by minimizing the effort needed to collect the objective evidence used for each evaluation event.

Although previous process improvement experience is helpful, it isn’t necessary to benefit from reading this book. Specifically, this book will be beneficial to the following groups:

■ Process improvement practitioners who must develop strategies for process improvement implementation and the transition to new or revised standards—Process improvement practitioners develop and support the processes that will be implemented and institutionalized. They need to have full knowledge of the requirements of multiple standards so they can identify the processes that should be selected for improvement.

■ Evaluators making compliance decisions and recommendations—Evaluators compare the actual implementation of processes and practices to standards and judge the degree of compliance. They need to understand the interactions among standards when developing findings and making recommendations.

■ Senior managers making decisions on standards selection and implementation—Senior management provides leadership, resources, and funding for process improvement and standards implementation. An understanding of the principles on which each standard is founded and the synergy among standards is valuable for their decision making.

■ Process implementers applying the processes that have been developed to support the selected standards—Understanding the features of each standard provides the knowledge that will help them understand why and how the organization’s processes are defined and provide guidance for collecting objective evidence needed for appraisals.

The frameworks addressed in this book represent multiple viewpoints and are based on many years of experience in different domains. They overlap in some places and address unique niches in others. Taken together they can provide a valuable foundation for real process and quality improvement.

The ISO 9001 standard defines the requirements for quality management systems and is broadly applicable to many domains. The other frameworks we discuss, however, are aimed at specific problem areas, namely, systems engineering, software engineering, and IT service management. Their domains and a qualitative view of their areas of overlap are shown in Figure 1.1. Specific details illustrating their relationships are discussed later in this book, notably in chapters 5 and 6.

These frameworks adopt a variety of approaches to presentation and differ in the level of detail provided. In some cases, notably in CMMI, substantial amounts of informative material and many examples are provided. For other frameworks, such as ISO 9001, the presentation is rather skeletal and interpretation is largely left to the implementing organization (and auditors). The range of detail presented in each framework may be inferred by examining the number of pages of text provided in each framework, as shown in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.1 Framework domains.

Figure 1.2 Framework size.

Structural differences also distinguish the frameworks. The process areas and practices in CMMI include the concepts of increasing capability or maturity. These concepts may be applied to individual process areas or to predefined groups of process areas. Within limits, organizations may choose the sequence in which they wish to address the process areas and the targeted capability level. In contrast, the selected ISO standards define the requirements for processes, activities, and tasks but do not describe levels of achievement.

As we will see when we discuss appraisals, the time and effort needed to implement processes that are compliant with these frameworks varies considerably. This is due, in part, to the degree of emphasis placed on institutionalization and, in part, to the type and amount of objective evidence expected by each appraisal or certification method.

Clearly, an organization has many things to consider before embarking on process improvement efforts using multiple frameworks. Among the topics to consider are:

■ Should we adopt any framework at all? Organizations with well-established processes and infrastructure may decide that adoption of a framework or standard may not bring meaningful business benefits.

■ Is certification or appraisal against a framework a mandatory business requirement? In many industries, certification against one or more standards is a de facto entry criterion for doing business.

■ Should multiple frameworks be used? Are different frameworks required for different customers? Is a single framework inadequate for addressing the needs of the organization’s products and services?

■ If multiple frameworks are used, should one of them be the main driver for the organization’s processes? If, for example, ISO 9001 certification is needed for certain customers, perhaps the organization’s processes should focus on addressing that standard before adding practices driven by a different framework.

■ Should the same set of frameworks and organizational processes be used across the entire enterprise? Are the same capability or maturity levels appropriate across the enterprise?

Let us note that while the focus of this book is on exploiting the synergy of multiple frameworks for process improvement, another approach is to integrate several frameworks into a single model. One noteworthy example is CMMI itself, which is largely based on three predecessor capability maturity models. Examples of other efforts include:

■ FAA-iCMM—Version 2.0 of this framework, developed by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, was released in 2001. The framework addresses acquisition, supply, engineering, development, operation, evolution, and support.

■ Integrated System Framework (ISF) for Excellence—This framework is being developed by Integrated System Diagnostics (ISD) and incorporates several of the frameworks discussed in this book as well as other models, such as the People CMM, and improvement concepts, such as Six Sigma.

Finally, we should mention that there are other ongoing efforts to develop maps between models that may use different mapping paradigms and sometimes come to different conclusions. Such efforts include work by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) summarized in the 2007 draft report (Kitson et al. 2007) where CMMI v1.2 is compared to ISO 9001. Although this draft report doesn’t address multiple frameworks, it provides a detailed mapping between those two major frameworks.

The book is organized as follows:

■ Chapter 1—This introduction.

■ Chapter 2—This chapter discusses the motivations for process improvement, the factors that make improvement difficult, and the conditions and activities that help enable improvement. We address two widely used process improvement approaches, namely, Plan–Do–Check–Act and IDEAL^SM. The advantages and issues associated with the use of multiple frameworks are introduced.

■ Chapter 3—The structure and content of Capability Maturity Model Integration, version 1.2, are summarized here. We discuss the characteristics and expectations of each process area (PA). Several viewpoints are represented here as the PAs are examined by category, by lower- and higher-maturity groupings, and by staged and continuous representation.

The concept of “constellations,” which is new to version 1.2, is introduced. The changes from CMMI v1.1 ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Process Improvement Fundamentals
• 3 Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)
• 4 ISO Standards
• 5 Framework Mapping
• 6 Tying It All Together
• 7 Appraisals
• Appendix A: Acronyms
• Appendix B: References
• Appendix C: Changes from CMMI v1.1 to CMMI v1.2
• Appendix D: ISO 9001:2000 to CMMI v1.2 Map
• Appendix E: ISO 15288:2008 to CMMI v1.2 Map
• Appendix F: ISO 12207:2008 to CMMI vl.2 Map
• Appendix G: ISO 20000:2005 to CMMI v1.2 Map
• Index