TABLE OF CONTENTS When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much.
Fen-Yang
Take a minute and answer the questions in Figure 5.1. Then, once you ve finished reading this chapter, take the quiz in Figure 5.4 ( What Did You Learn? What Will You Do ) to find out how much this information has helped you with your own CMMI-based process improvement. Remember, these quizzes are like process improvement work, there is rarely a right or wrong answer; there are only answers that best suit your organization s business needs.
It is interesting to observe organizations engage in CMMI-based process improvement. People will spend tens of thousands of dollars creating and maintaining or buying processes and procedures they believe are compliant with CMMI practices and, somehow, the act of creating tons of procedures and paper becomes synonymous with process improvement. It s almost as if for some organizations the measure that processes have been improved is the increasing page count of their process documents. The irony of this is that in all of CMMI, there is but one GP (GP 3.1), described in two-thirds of a page, that addresses defining and documenting the organization s processes.
There are two truths that organizations should know about process improvement. First, many management and...
