CMMI® for Services
Guidelines for Superior Service
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CarnegieMellon Software Engineering Institute
The SEI Series in Software Engineering
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Forrester, Eileen C.
CMMI for services : guidelines for superior service / Eileen C. Forrester, Brandon L. Buteau, Sandy Shrum.
p. cm. — (The SEI series in software engineering)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-321-63589-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Capability maturity model (Computer software) 2. Software engineering. I. Buteau, Brandon L. II.
Shrum, Sandy. III. Title.
QA76.758.F6725 2009
005.1—dc22
2009031362
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by copyright, and permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. For information regarding permissions, write to:
Pearson Education, Inc.
Rights and Contracts Department
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Fax: (617) 671-3447
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-63589-1
ISBN-10: 0-321-63589-2
Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at RR Donnelley in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
Second Printing, January 2010
Roger Bate, the longtime architect of CMMI, passed away shortly after the release of the CMMI-SVC model. He was an accomplished and extraordinary man, and the authors of this book and developers of CMMI-SVC were fortunate to have worked with him on his last project. We humbly dedicate this book in his memory.
Contents
PART ONE—ABOUT CMMI FOR SERVICES
Do You Have These Common Problems?
How Does CMMI Help You Solve These Problems?
Services and Service Systems in CMMI for Services versus SOA and SaaS
Stakeholder, Customer, and End User
Required, Expected, and Informative Components
Using Required, Expected, and Informative Components
Specific Goal and Practice Summaries
Supporting Informative Components
Important Roles in Process Improvement
The SCAMPI Lead Appraiser or Team Leader
The Purpose and Function of Appraisals
Finding the Right SCAMPI Lead Appraiser or Team Leader
An Approach to Getting Started
4 ACHIEVING PROCESS IMPROVEMENT THAT LASTS
Quantitatively Managed Process
Understanding Generic Practices
Understanding Capability Levels
Comparing Capability Levels and Maturity Levels
5 RELATIONSHIPS AMONG PROCESS AREAS
Relationships That Drive Service Establishment and Delivery
Relationships That Drive Service Management
Lifecycles in CMMI for Services
6 ESSAYS ABOUT CMMI FOR SERVICES
Using CMMI-SVC in a DoD 0rganization
Organizational Elements and CMMI Terminology
What We Can Learn from High-Performing IT Organizations to Stop the Madness in IT Outsourcing
Our Ten-Year Study of High-Performing IT Organizations
Common Culture among High Performers
The Performance Differences between High and Low Performers
What Goes Wrong in Too Many IT Outsourcing Programs
An Effective System of IT Operations
The Limits of the Maturity Level Number
Considerations for the Responsible Buyer
Remaining Engaged after Buying
Seeking Accomplishment as Well as Capability
How to Appraise Security Using CMMI for Services
Public Education in an Age of Accountability
Orienting Education to Delivering Services
Federal Legislation Drives Change
A Service Agreement for Education
A Process for Consistent Curriculum Delivery
A Process for Efficient Decision Making
Providing for Sustained Improvement
Other Applications for the Model
A Better Future for American Education
National Government Services Uses CMMI-SVC and Builds on a History with CMMI-DEV
Treating Systems Engineering as a Service
Legal Services in a Changing World
CMMI and Corporate Social Responsibility
What Is Corporate Social Responsibility?
Similarities between CSR and CMMI
A Practical Example: CMMI-SVC in Tourism
Expanding the Universe of CMMI with the CMMI for Services Constellation
Why Did We Ever Attempt to Create CMMI-SVC?
The Path to Success Isn’t Always Straightforward
Protecting the CMMI Legacy and Maintaining Commonality and Consistency
Northrop Grumman’s Plans for Using CMMI-SVC
PART TWO—GENERIC GOALS AND GENERIC PRACTICES, AND THE PROCESS AREAS
GENERIC GOALS AND GENERIC PRACTICES
CAPACITY AND AVAILABILITY MANAGEMENT
CAUSAL ANALYSIS AND RESOLUTION
DECISION ANALYSIS AND RESOLUTION
INCIDENT RESOLUTION AND PREVENTION
ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATION AND DEPLOYMENT
ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESS DEFINITION
ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESS PERFORMANCE
PROJECT MONITORING AND CONTROL
PROCESS AND PRODUCT QUALITY ASSURANCE
QUANTITATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT
PART THREE—THE APPENDICES AND GLOSSARY
C CMMI FOR SERVICES PROJECT PARTICIPANTS
CMMI for Services Advisory Group
Preface
Services make up 80 percent of the world economy and comprise more than half of U.S. Department of Defense acquisitions. The primary purpose of the CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC) model, which is the basis of this book, is to guide service providers as they improve the way they do their work—their processes. Improved processes result in improved service performance, customer satisfaction, and profitability. When organizations using CMMI-SVC make improvements in their performance, they can ultimately improve the health of the world economy.
CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) models are collections of effective practices that help organizations to improve their processes. The CMMI-SVC model, like all of the CMMI Product Suite,1 is developed by a team from industry, government, and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). Hundreds of reviewers suggest new content and changes for the model. Early adopters pilot the model and give further feedback. A network of hundreds of SEI partners and thousands of users apply the model to their work and report their experience and results, further improving model content. In this way, the CMMI-SVC model represents the ongoing consensus of thousands of practitioners about how to provide superior service.
1. There are CMMI models that focus on the development of products and services (CMMI for Development) and on the acquisition of products and services (CMMI for Acquisition). See the CMMI website for more information about these members of the CMMI Product Suite (www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/).
Purpose
This book provides guidance on how all types of service provider organizations can establish, manage, and improve services that meet the needs of their customers and end users.
This guidance includes the following:
• Delivering services that meet the terms of service agreements
• Managing the organization’s capacity to provide services and ensure the availability of services
• Addressing service incidents effectively
• Establishing standard services and service levels that meet the strategic needs of the organization as well as the needs of customers and end users
• Ensuring the continuity of services in the face of disaster
By integrating these and other practices, CMMI-SVC helps service providers to establish, deliver, and manage services.
Organization of This Book
This book is organized into three main parts:
• Part One—About CMMI for Services
• Part Two—Generic Goals and Generic Practices, and the Process Areas
• Part Three—The Appendices and Glossary
Part One, “About CMMI for Services,” consists of six chapters.
• Chapter 1, “Introduction,” offers a broad view of CMMI and the Services constellation,2 concepts of process improvement, the history of models used for process improvement, and key concepts of CMMI for Services.
2. A “constellation” is defined as a collection of components that are used to construct models, training materials, and apraisal materials in an area of interest (e.g., services, development).
• Chapter 2, “Process Area Components,” describes all of the components of the CMMI-SVC process areas.
• Chapter 3, “How to Start Using CMMI,” describes the important roles needed for implementing a CMMI-based process improvement program, explains how appraisals can be used, identifies training that can help, and provides tips for getting started using CMMI.
• Chapter 4, “Achieving Process Improvement That Lasts,” explains how selected practices in all CMMI models enable the organization to make improvement part of how it does business, including descriptions of generic goals, generic practices, maturity levels, capability levels, and equivalent staging.
• Chapter 5, “Relationships among Process Areas,” describes how process areas interrelate and provides insight into the interactions of the CMMI-SVC process areas.
• Chapter 6, “Essays about CMMI for Services,” consists of invited essays from contributing authors. The essays cover early use of CMMI-SVC, unusual applications, use of CMMI-SVC in new domains, and solutions from field use to challenges such as including other frameworks in appraisals.
Part Two, “Generic Goals and Generic Practices, and the Process Areas,” contains all of the CMMI-SVC required and expected components. It also contains related informative components, including subpractices, notes, examples, and typical work products.
Part Two contains 25 sections. The first section contains the generic goals and practices. The remaining 24 sections each represent one of the CMMI-SVC process areas.3 Process areas contain effective practices covering topics ranging from configuration management to service delivery.
3. A process area is a cluster of related best practices in an area that, when implemented collectively, satisfies a set of goals considered important for making significant improvement in that area. This concept is covered in detail in Chapter 2.
To make these process areas easy to find, they are organized alphabetically by process area acronym. Most CMMI users quickly learn the process area acronyms and abandon their longer names for their shorter abbreviations. Here’s an example in which the order of the process areas by full process area title versus their abbreviations is different: Supplier Agreement Management (SAM) appears before Service Delivery (SD). Each section contains goals, practices, and examples in a format that enables you to locate information quickly.
Part Three, “The Appendices and Glossary,” consists of four sections:
• Appendix A, “References,” contains references you can use to locate documented sources of information, such as reports, process improvement models, industry standards, and books that are related to CMMI-SVC.
• Appendix B, “Acronyms,” defines the acronyms used in the model.
• Appendix C, “CMMI for Service Project Participants,” contains lists of team members who participated in the development of CMMISVC, Version 1.2.
• Appendix D, “Glossary,” defines many of the terms used in CMMI-SVC.
Extras in This Book
Readers who are familiar with the model and with prior CMMI books will find these changes and extras in this book on CMMI-SVC. We extensively revised Part One to add more material on service concepts, including a discussion of lifecyles in service environments, as well as invited essays on the use and application of CMMI-SVC. We also clarified and shortened the material on generic goals and practices, and updated the material on getting started and sustaining improvement. In Part Two, we added margin notes to all the process areas. These notes describe why the practices in a process area are valuable and rephrase what the process area is about in plainer language than the formal model language. We also added author notes in Part Two to amplify service concepts or to explain how to apply core model concepts in a service context.
How to Use This Book
Whether you are new to process improvement, new to CMMI, or already familiar with CMMI, Part One can help you understand why CMMI-SVC is the model to use for improving your service processes. Over time, you will use Part Two the most because it contains the practices of the model. The primary value of Part Three is the glossary.
Readers New to Process Improvement
If you are new to process improvement or new to the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) concept, we suggest that you read Chapter 1 first. Chapter 1 contains an overview of CMMI-based process improvement as well as descriptions of the concepts and conventions used in the rest of the CMMI-SVC model.
Next, skim Part Two, including generic goals and practices as well as the process areas, to get a feel for the scope of the practices contained in the model. Pay close attention to the purpose and introductory notes at the beginning of each process area. Also pay attention to how information is organized and presented in Part Two.
In Part Three, skim the references in Appendix A to see if additional sources would be beneficial to read before using CMMI-SVC. Read through the acronyms and glossary to become familiar with the language of CMMI. Then, go back and read the details of Part Two.
Readers Experienced with Process Improvement
If you are new to CMMI but have experience with other process improvement models, such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) or International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9000, you will recognize similarities in their structure and content.
We recommend that you read Part One to understand how CMMI is different from other process improvement models. If you have experience with other models, you may want to select which sections to read first. Read Part Two, looking for practices you recognize from other models that you have used, and note variations. You may notice a different level of detail in CMMI than in the models you are accustomed to using.
Next, review the glossary and the “Important CMMI-SVC Concepts” section in Chapter 1 to understand how some terminology may differ from that used in the process improvement models you know. Concepts may be shared by CMMI and other standards, but they may use different terms to name them.
Readers Familiar with CMMI
If you have reviewed or used a CMMI model before, you will quickly recognize the CMMI concepts discussed and many of the practices presented.
Review the process areas specific to CMMI-SVC first:
• Capacity and Availability Management (CAM)
• Incident Resolution and Prevention (IRP)
• Service Continuity (SCON)
• Service Delivery (SD)
• Service System Development (SSD)
• Service System Transition (SST)
• Strategic Service Management (STSM)
Then go back and review the other process areas you are already familiar with and see the guidance for applying these practices to a service environment.
User Feedback and Questions
Your suggestions for improving CMMI are continually reviewed and used to make changes to models, appraisal methods, and training materials each time they are released. For information on how to provide feedback, see the CMMI website at www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/models/change-requests.html. If you have questions about CMMI, send e-mail to [email protected].
Acknowledgments
This book wouldn’t have been possible without the work of multiple people from multiple organizations dedicated to CMMI-based process improvement. The CMMI-SVC model is contained in the book, which was created by the CMMI Product Team. Other helpful information was added by Eileen Forrester, Brandon Buteau, and Sandy Shrum.
The CMMI-SVC Model Development Team included members from different organizations and backgrounds. Ultimately, without the work of those involved in the CMMI project since it began in 1998, this book would not exist.
The CMMI-SVC Model Development Team developed what is now CMMI-SVC, V1.2, from the input of lots of users and reviewers. That team consisted of the following members: Drew Allison, Roger Bate, Rhonda Brown, Brandon Buteau, Eileen Clark, Eileen Forrester, Craig Hollenbach, Mike Konrad, Frank Niessink, Mary Lynn Penn, Roy Porter, Rich Raphael, Pamela Schoppert, Sandy Shrum, Jerry Simpson, and Jeff Zeidler.
We would also like to acknowledge those who directly contributed to this book.
We want to thank Bill Peterson for his support and for his leadership of the Software Engineering Process Management Program (which includes CMMI) at the SEI.
We have special thanks for the contributors to Chapter 6. All of these authors were willing to share their insights and experiences and met aggressive deadlines to do so. These contributors were Kevin Behr, Betsey Cox-Buteau, Sally Cunningham, Kieran Doyle, Suzanne Garcia-Miller, Hillel Glazer, Robert K. Green, Gene Kim, Angela Marks, Barbara Neeb-Bruckner, Brad Nelson, Mike Phillips, and Hal Wilson. We are delighted that they agreed to contribute their experiences to our book.
We are grateful to the reviewers of this book, Agapi Svolou, Hillel Glazer, and Pat O’Toole. Their useful comments helped us to improve the book and to better convey our ideas.
Special thanks go to Addison-Wesley Publishing Partner, Peter Gordon, for his assistance, experience, and advice. We’d also like to thank Kim Boedigheimer, Anna Popick, John Fuller, Audrey Doyle, Evelyn Pyle, and Dmitri Korzh for their help with the design, editing, and final production of this book.
From Eileen Forrester
I thank my two coauthors, Sandy and Brandon. I can’t imagine doing this work without you. In addition, Craig Hollenbach, who led the volunteer industry team for the first two years of the project, is an accomplished and generous collaborator. We wouldn’t have this model or the book without his fine work. I also acknowledge Mike Konrad and Mike Phillips for asking me to lead the CMMI-SVC work. It’s been an amazing experience, possible only because of your trust. I thank my dear friends and collaborators, Julia Allen, David Carney, Audrey Dorofee, Suzanne Garcia-Miller, and Ray Obenza, for their constant encouragement and discussion. I especially want to thank two of my many supportive family members. My nephew Alex was the biggest fan of my prior book, and at age ten asked good questions until he understood the work I do—no mean feat. My brother Joe’s unflagging pride and interest in what I am working on has been an unexpected treasure at this point in my career.
From Brandon Buteau
First, I am deeply grateful to my two coauthors, Eileen and Sandy. Besides granting me the honor of joining them in working on this book, they are both exceptional collaborators and have made the experience easier than I could have possibly imagined at the beginning. I’m also thankful to Craig Hollenbach, who invited me to work on the CMMI-SVC model team at its beginning, and who trusted me with a significant leadership role in its development.
I would not have the skills today that made it possible for me to contribute to the CMMI-SVC model or this book without the early guidance of my parents. My father taught me the value of disciplined reasoning, and my mother taught me the value of subtleties in the meanings of words. The result has been my lifelong appreciation of good arguments and good definitions.
Finally, my wife, Betsey, has been a complete jewel throughout all my work on the model and the book, and has gradually progressed from being a cheerful supporter and patient sounding board to an enthusiastic advocate of CMMI-SVC practices in her own professional field. I cannot thank her enough.
From Sandy Shrum
I would like to thank my coauthors, Eileen and Brandon. My work with them, both when developing the CMMI-SVC model and assembling this book, has been a terrific and very rewarding learning experience. I’d also like to thank those on the CMMI Product Development Teams that I’ve worked with over the years to develop and support CMMI models. There are so many, it would be difficult to name them all.
My work with CMMI has given me opportunities I otherwise would not have had. Finally, I’d like to thank my boyfriend, Jimmy Orsag, for his loving support and advice. Through all of the hard work on both the model and the book, he encouraged me in countless ways.