When industry conversations are loaded with professional acronyms of frameworks and certifications, it might be inevitable that a few slip by without your full understanding. Additionally, the information overload surrounding many of these acronyms can make it hard to determine fact from fiction. Although CMMI may fall into these categories, it is one acronym that is well worth the time it takes to understand.
ISACA Chief Operating Officer Simona Rollinson recently sat down with CMMI Lead Appraiser and Co-founder of Two Harbors Consulting, George Zack, to break down several CMMI misconceptions and shed light on the realities regarding the maturity model. Their full conversation took place on a recent episode of ISACA Live and delved into what CMMI is while highlighting important truths surrounding the model.
What is CMMI?
ISACA’s Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a maturity model that assists organizations of all types around the world, from medical devices and telecommunications to aerospace and transportation. By acting as a benchmark for best business practices over the past several decades that organizations can measure themselves against, CMMI enables enterprises to identify gaps in their maturity and establish a clear and achievable path forward for improving and reaching those established best practices.
Here are some of the common misconceptions and their respective realities regarding CMMI:
- Myth: CMMI is only for large organizations.
Reality: CMMI is applicable for organizations of all sizes, including small businesses. “Even within large organizations, many of the groups that I’ve worked with have been small groups, meaning organizations lesser than 50 people,” says Zack. “And the reason why it works is because those teams or those organizations, just like large organizations, they have processes that they are looking to benchmark or assess as to how they’re performing and are looking to improve.”
- Myth: CMMI is only for software development or organizations that are bidding for government contracts.
Reality: CMMI began in software development but has evolved to be commonly used in organizations for many things outside of software. And although organizations often look to CMMI to showcase a certain level of maturity in order to put in bids for proposals or as part of their business strategies, these are not the only applications of CMMI.
Zack explains, “Integration is part of its name because it’s applicable for all types of development, all types of services, all types of work, including consideration of people, data, measurements, acquisition.”
- Myth: Organizations must use every part of CMMI in every part of their organization.
Reality: For organizations that are newly adopting CMMI, it is not necessary to take on the entirety of the model all at once. CMMI is broken down into more than two dozen domains, or practice areas, that are applicable to different areas of the organization, enabling organizations to approach assessment one step at a time. “Which of these practice areas are going to allow me to assess the capabilities of a functional set of work that we perform?” Zack says. “What’s going to provide value back to the organization?”
- Myth: CMMI doesn’t work well or is unnecessary when utilizing other methodologies like Agile or ISO.
Reality: Regardless of what type of methodology is currently in place or will be implemented in the future, CMMI can still be applied and prove to be beneficial. CMMI provides explanatory information and cues, both for organizations that are leveraging the model and appraisal teams, to help teams understand what they may be seeing. “There has long been a myth that CMMI is prescriptive to a certain lifecycle or a particular methodology, and that’s absolutely not the case,” Zack says.
- Myth: CMMI is a time-consuming, expensive, “check-the-box” audit.
Reality: CMMI will take time, but the investment is worthwhile for businesses that are looking to set goals, measure valuable improvements and achieve an expected ROI. “If you want to have mature, fit, capable, efficient processes, those are things that are going to take some investment from an organization to develop that capability,” says Zack.
The best practices exist outside of the appraisal process, meaning that they are constantly present. While an audit may be useful in demonstrating a certain maturity or capability level, CMMI appraisals and benchmarks are continually considered to improve the performance of an organization at any point in time.
For additional CMMI myth-busting and insights, including answers to questions from the community, watch the entire ISACA Live episode. To learn more about CMMI and how it can apply to and improve your enterprise’s performance, visit https://www.isaca.org/enterprise/cmmi-performance-solutions.
Editor’s note: To learn more about the truths behind common CMMI myths and misconceptions, download ISACA’s new CMMI Mythbusting resource here.