How Performance Results of CMMI-Based Process Improvement Relates to CMMI - Essay Example

This paper provides a summary of the article Performance Results of CMMI-Based Process Improvement and its relationship with CMMI. Summary The goals and objectives, products and services of organizations are not uniform. Nor do organizations uniformly implement CMMI models to improve their business processes or the manner in which analyse the results obtained. Irrespective of these variances the CMM-based process improvement approach is proving to be effective. Evidence of this started with the earlier special report published by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI).

This article provides further empirical evidence taken from diverse sources of business activity that includes the telecommunications, financial, manufacturing and defence sectors. This article classifies performance categories into six broad areas, consisting of cost, schedule, productivity, quality, customer satisfaction, and return on investment and employing CMMI is to provide benefits in these areas. Usually organizations choose a combination of these benefits or refinements in these benefits and the use of CMMI targets this.

Through the comparison of the sum of results of quantitative performance across 35 organizations with regards to these benefits prior to the use of CMMI and subsequent this article justifies the use of CMMI towards improvement in performance results. The median improvement as a percentage with respect to cost, schedule, productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction was 34%, 50%, 61%, 48%, and 14% respectively, while in the case of returns on investment it was 40.1. According to the article through the use of CMMI organizations can achieve similar results, but there is the need for more quantitative studies to provide clarity on the circumstances that lead to these process improvements and the manner in which they can be sustained.

Expanding on the demonstration of impact on performance by CMMI, this article provides greater detail on the changes that organizations report with regards to these six benefits. In the case of costs the changes include cost of final or intermediate products, costs of processes, and savings achieved model-based process improvement. In the case of schedule the improvements reported relate to schedule predictability and the reduced time required to complete the work. Improvements reported for productivity are essentially on the improvements on the amount of work that is completed over a given period of time.

Reported improvements in quality relate to the reduction in the numbers of defects observed in finished or intermediary products. Improvements in customer satisfaction are based on customer satisfaction feedback received from surveys conducted. Improvements in ROI are reported in several ways that include benefit-to-cost ratios, net present value, internal rate of return, payback periods, and break even points. The article then goes onto the details of measures of process performance achieved in the case studies of several organizations.

The case studies include the organizations of 3H Technology, ABB, Hitachi Software Engineering, Motorola Global Software Group, Raytheon Network Centric Systems, North Texas, TrialStat Corporation, Tufts Health Plan, Warner Robins Air Logistic Center, The article concludes that organizations that have based their process improvement methods on CMMI models have demonstrated marked improvement in their performance, but more studies are required to understand the different reasons that contribute to this success and also generate more evidence to establish the benefits of CMMI models for process improvements and hence performance in organizations (Gibson, Goldensen & Kost, 2006). . This article relates to CMMI because it attempts to justify the use of CMMI models by organizations to