TABLE OF CONTENTS The principles behind CMMI and its use in process improvement are the same regardless of the model representation. The motivation behind launching and sustaining process improvement programs should always be backed by sound business goals.
There are many standards and models that have been developed and have evolved over the past decade that have been used to help guide an organization's process improvement initiative. These standards and models include: ISO 9001, TickIT, BOOTSTRAP, SPICE, CMM for Software, EIA-731, and CMMI . Not only are there many standards and models available, but they also come in "flavors" sometimes called representations. The two most common representations are staged and continuous, which not only offer a way of categorizing process areas, but are also used as the mechanism to guide an organization's process improvement initiative. Today, strong statements are made as to why one approach is more desirable and effective than the other.
Given the two representations in CMMI , an organization may feel it has to choose to approach process improvement from either the process area capability approach or the organizational maturity approach. However, after helping to develop CMMI workshops for the SEI, teaching those CMMI workshops to thousands of people, conducting CMMI assessments, and helping organizations to get their CMMI -based process improvement program going, it is my belief that both the staged representation and the continuous representation not only can but must be used together to provide a realistic approach that results in effective...
