CMMI'S PLACE IN THE PROCESS IMPROVEMENT UNIVERSE

CMMI’S PLACE IN THE PROCESS IMPROVEMENT UNIVERSE

The publication of CMM (for Software) in 1995 spawned the emergence of an entire industry. Within a few years, hundreds of organizations and many thousands of people worldwide were spending millions of dollars to improve their software processes using CMM’s guidelines. CMM-based conferences, tools, books, and consultants seemed to pop up overnight, everywhere, and simultaneously. The publication of CMMI added fuel to the fire, increasing both the supply and demand for expertise and assets devoted to improving software, systems engineering, acquisition, and management processes.

The world of CMMI process improvement has grown so big that if you spend most of your professional hours living inside of it, you can easily come to believe that CMMI and process improvement are one and the same. Just like people living in the 15th century who believed that suspiciously arced horizon about 20 miles out to sea was the edge of the world, I come across many people who believe that the world of systems process improvement is bounded and defined by the 700+ pages of CMMI. Both beliefs are observably inaccurate.

The boundaries of our natural universe continue to elude all of us and even the brightest astrophysicists. As a society, we got over Europe not being the whole world, comforting ourselves with the knowledge that at least Earth was a significant astronomical body. That delusion too was smashed, but that was okay because at least we were the occupants of a galaxy that surely was a major player in the universe. A recent article in Scientific American explains how it is mathematically and physically probable — not possible, probable! — that there are many parallel universes, none lesser than our own.^[6] This kind of information can really bruise a person’s ego and sense of self-importance!

And so it is with process improvement. People want to believe that CMMI is systems process improvement in its entirety. We want to believe this, because then systems process improvement is bounded, known, and comfortable. Oh sure, the heretics among us will occasionally give a gratuitous nod of acknowledgment to those aliens residing on Planet ISO, or those in the IEEE nebulae or the Malcolm Baldrige asteroid belt, or on that old, dead world, TQM. But CMMI and its close twin moons — TSP^SM and PSP^SM — is, for all practical purposes, the process improvement universe, right?

Wrong. Neither CMM nor CMMI created systems process improvement no more than the Earth created the universe. Just the opposite occurred: process improvement created CMM and CMMI. If you step back for a moment, pause, take a deep breath, stop listening to the dogma and hyperbole that flows freely in this industry, and look close and hard at organizations, you’ll find naturally evolving business and process improvements organically springing up all over the place. Sometimes these blossoming improvements can be correlated with process areas or practices in CMMI. Sometimes they spring up almost despite the destructive path of a misguided CMMI bulldozer driven by a slash-and-burn operator at the controls.

^[6]Tegmark, Max, Parallel Universes, Scientific American, May 2003.