By Ron Lear, Vice President of Models and Frameworks at ISACA
The Capability Maturity Model Integration, or CMMI, has grown and evolved quite a bit in its 30-plus-year history. Tracing CMMI’s roots back to the Software CMM first released in 1991 for the Department of Defense, CMMI set the bar for process improvement and is synonymous with what the term “maturity level” now means across a broad set of industries, domains, frameworks and geographies.
With the release of CMMI Performance Solutions, previously known as CMMI v2.0 in 2018, there was a fundamental shift from traditional process improvement compliance to outcomes-based continuous performance improvement with consistent and independently verified achievement of better quality, improved cost and schedule performance, higher productivity, less risk and better business results for those organizations that have previously adopted CMMI.
Excitingly, with the advent of this new CMMI Performance Solutions model, the performance evolution continues based on clear and consistent data and feedback from customers as verified by independent appraisal teams. This includes those organizations like the DOD and civilian agencies buying products and services from CMMI contract organizations. With the rapidly increasing pace of technology, business, information growth and changing world events, CMMI has had to evolve more rapidly than ever. As such, I am happy to highlight the release of CMMI v3.0—a culmination and assembly of community-wide collaboration with new best practices and content to make CMMI even more relevant.
CMMI v3.0 now broadens organizational performance improvement beyond the historical product development, service operations and supplier management domains to now include security, safety, data management, people management and managing virtual workforce best practices. These eight primary business domains, coupled with core best practices that are common to all businesses, are integrated into a single yet highly customizable model of integrated and proven best practices. Whether your organization wants to build a new capability or improve and mature an existing one, CMMI v3.0 provides a framework for doing so across a broad spectrum of industries, disciplines and domains to continue to help organizations improve their performance effectively and efficiently.
We’ve recently released the 2024 CMMI Technical Report: Performance Results, which highlights the improvements of organizations that adopted CMMI as recorded in the CMMI Performance Report (a required artifact from CMMI Benchmark appraisals) and independently validated by certified CMMI lead appraisers and appraisal teams.
The newly released report captures “before and after” improvement intentions across the 13,925 organizations appraised from 2019 to 2023, including 50,666 business objectives and their related KPIs. Top improvement areas achieved include:
- On-time delivery increased by 33 percent
- Schedule variance (delays) reduced by an average of 48 percent
- Development productivity improved by an average of 17 percent
- Defect rate or density reduced by an average of 31 percent
- Customer satisfaction improved by 13 percent
The report also found that organizations using CMMI often experience a significant multiplier effect of business improvements. When businesses target areas that need specific enhancements, such as reducing defects or improving productivity, they also frequently experience substantial—up to 42 percent—advancements throughout their entire enterprise. In many cases, businesses have found, for example, that elevating quality standards has led to better customer satisfaction, and enhancing staffing has resulted in greater productivity.
CMMI Performance Solutions, and the v3.0 Model and related updates, continue to demonstrate consistent, continuous performance for quality, cost and schedule management, and productivity improvements in nearly any organization or industry, worldwide.
And what’s next? We recently kicked off a CMMI AI Working Group that is collecting industry best practices to influence updates to model content around artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, machine learning and advanced manufacturing. Stay tuned for more exciting updates on the AI front.
Please take a look at the new content in CMMI v3.0, and the results shown in 2024 CMMI Technical Report:Performance Results, and let us know what you think. As you will see, CMMI continues to deliver on its promises of better cost and schedule performance, higher quality and lower risk for the organizations adopting it.
