TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter is designed to help the reader understand the basic tenets of Maturity Level 3 in the staged representation of the CMMI. However, because this chapter consists of summaries of the process areas, anyone wishing to get a better idea of the model, no matter which representation is to be used, can benefit from this chapter. Once again, we are not attempting to teach the CMMI. We simply offer a condensed version of the various areas and key points to consider.
Maturity Level 3 differs from Level 2 in that now an organizational way of doing business has been developed. What that means is that the best practices and lessons learned from the projects have bubbled up to the organizational level to create an organizational identity. There are common, shared approaches for performing daily tasks on each project. For example, estimating the size of a project may be done using the Delphi Technique (basically subject matter experts discussing best-case and worst-case estimates), a standard metric may have been institutionalized (such as using function points instead of lines of code), and a standard tool may be in use to actually calculate the size.
This organizational way of doing business is documented in the Organization's Set of Standard Processes (OSSP). However, should a project need to tailor this OSSP to more adequately fit its needs, then that tailoring request is bought to a decision-making body (usually the Engineering Process Group [EPG]), and if appropriate,...
