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...