Question

How can CMMI be used to identify and reconcile process clash? Please explain.

Answer 1

The Capability Maturity Model Integration, or CMMI, is a process model that provides a clear definition of what an organization should do to promote behaviours that lead to improved performance. With five “Maturity Levels” or three “Capability Levels,” the CMMI defines the most important elements that are required to build great products, or deliver great services, and wraps them all up in a comprehensive model.

The CMMI helps us understand the answer to the question “how do we know?”

· How do we know what we are good at?

· How do we know if we’re improving?

· How do we know if the process we use is working well?

· How do we know if our requirements change process is useful?

· How do we know if our products are as good as they can be?

The CMMI also helps us identify and achieve measurable business goals, build better products, keep customers happier, and ensure that we are working as efficiently as possible.

A Process Area is a cluster of related practices in an area that, when implemented collectively, satisfy a set of goals considered important for making significant improvement in that area. All CMMI process areas are common to both continuous and staged representations.

The continuous representation enables the organization to choose the focus of its process improvement efforts by choosing those process areas, or sets of interrelated process areas, that best benefit the organization and its business objectives. Although there are some limits on what an organization can choose because of the dependencies among process areas, the organization has considerable freedom in its selection.

Once you select the process areas, you must also select how much you would like to improve the processes associated with those process areas. Capability levels and generic goals and practices support the improvement of processes in individual process areas.

The CMMI Process Areas PAs can be grouped into the following four categories to understand their interactions and links with one another regardless of their defined level:

Process Management

Project Management

Engineering

Support

Each process area is defined by a set of goals and practices. There are two categories of goals and practices.

Generic goals and practices: - They are part of every process area.

Specific goals and practices:- They are specific to a given process area

CMMI is essentially a set of requirements for engineering processes, particularly those involved in product development. It consists of two kinds of information –process areas (PAs) that describe the goals and activities that make up process requirements in a specific focus area, and generic practices (GPs) that are applied across the process areas to guide improvement in process capability. The process areas include requirements for

•basic project management and control

•basic engineering life cycle processes

•fundamental support processes

•process monitoring and improvement processes

•integrated development using teams

Identification of clashes and their rectification is a very challenging job. Identified clashes include hard clashes and soft clashes which have huge potential to affect the project if left unresolved. They can result into significant amount of rework if feasible solutions are not provided on time.

Managing clashes in this way is not only more efficient, it is also more effective and if it helps the fundamental task of clash resolution to take place then projects will have a lot less issues to address in the field, notwithstanding the benefits in operation that due consideration in design will have supported.

The benefits you can expect from using CMMI include the following:

● Your organization's activities are explicitly linked to your business objectives.

● Your visibility into the organization's activities is increased to help you ensure that your product or service meets the customer's expectations.

● You learn from new areas of best practice (e.g., measurement, risk).

● High maturity

Companies become aware that CMMI can be helpful to develop and deliver software with a high degree of quality. Many organizations find value in measuring their progress by conducting an appraisal. Appraisals are typically conducted for one or more of the following reasons.

● To determine how well the organization’s processes compare to CMMI best practices, and to identify areas where improvement can be made

● To inform external customers and suppliers of how well the organization’s processes compare to CMMI best practices

● To meet the contractual requirements of one or more customers

Appraisals of organizations using a CMMI model must conform to the requirements defined in the Appraisal Requirements for CMMI (ARC) document. There are three classes of appraisals, A, B and C, which focus on identifying improvement opportunities and comparing the organization’s processes to CMMI best practices. Appraisal teams use a CMMI model and ARC-conformant appraisal method to guide their evaluation of the organization and their reporting of conclusions. The appraisal results can then be used to plan improvements for the organization.

The benefits you can expect from using CMMI include the following:

● Your organization's activities are explicitly linked to your business objectives.

● Your visibility into the organization's activities is increased to help you ensure product

● Expectation service meets the customer's expectations.

● You learn from new areas of best practice (e.g., measurement, risk)