By now, most are aware of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and what a business can use CMMI strategies for. For those who aren’t mindful, CMMI a methodology for refining processes within a system, as the Project Management Institute informs us.
In a previous post, we covered the maturity levels of CMMI and what they entailed. Generally, maturity levels should progress naturally. Trying to hustle the process by skipping levels could cause the entire CMMI system to become undone.
However, there is a way around the tedious processes that are required to achieve each CMMI maturity level. It’s important to note that these methods don’t require you to skip levels. Instead, they put things in place so that the business can start preparing to undertake the next level while still at this one. It’s not pre-empting the system, but instead operating intelligently to accomplish more in a shorter space of time. As we mentioned previously, the levels that exist in a CMMI system are:
- Level 1: Initial: The business is mostly unaware of its process inefficiencies and cannot improve them
- Level 2: Managed: The systems are in place to understand how the company can improve its processes
- Level 3: Defined: the industry starts using proactive methods to determine where problems may occur and pre-empting them
- Level 4: Quantitatively Managed: The company has an overview of all of its processes along with measurable metrics to determine their level of efficiency
- Level 5: Optimization: The organization is in an iterative state where it can develop new improvements backed by data from its quantitative methods
How To Hack the System
Hacking maturity levels is not nearly as complicated as it initially sounds. Hacking each level can be done as follows:
Hack Level 1
Level 1 teams depend heavily on people and opinions to get things done. While this might be useful for a company that doesn’t maintain standards, any business that wants to implement CMMI strategies to improve itself can’t depend on these subjective analyses. The alternative is to shift focus away from a person-centric model and put more faith in proven standards. These standards need to be rigorously outlined to ensure that there is no mistake in their implementation.
Hack Level 2
At Leve 2, a company is working to ensure that its processes are adequately controlled and managed. In this step, the way to create a foundation for speeding up level 3 is to think proactively about how to improve these processes. Level 2’s self-contained methodology seeks to get the company aware of its own capabilities. This hack requires the personnel within the business to understand that they should be thinking about how to make processes more efficient.
Hack Level 3
This point is where proactive changes start happening. However, these changes are mostly just thrown out without regard to how the company can judge its effectiveness. By determining the metrics necessary to judge the success or failure of these changes, a company starts moving towards a quantitative analysis methodology and away from a qualitative analysis paradigm.
Hack Level 4
This stage uses data, infrastructure, and feedback mechanisms to determine how and where the business can improve based on data. If you put things in place at Level 3 as suggested through the hack, you can potentially spend very little time in Level 4 before graduating to Level 5. The framework for using data to make decisions is already in place from Level 3, so it’s just a matter of changing how the company uses it.
Hack Level 5
The lessons learned in Levels 1 to 4 offers a lot of insight into how the business functions, allowing the company always to be aware of how it can further optimize its processes.
Constant Improvement For CMMI Strategies
Level 5 deals solely with optimizing how the business collects, processes, and utilizes data to be better. At this stage, the company has successfully achieved the CMMI strategies to Level 5, but this stage is continuous and ongoing. If you’re in a hurry to get to Level 5, there’s no way you can skip the other four steps. They are crucial to overall development. Let us guide you to achieving a Level 5 rating in short a time as possible.