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 contribute to 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 was developed by a team from industry, government, and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). Hundreds of reviewers suggest new content and changes for the model. Adopters pilot model content 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.
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.
• Chapter 2, Process Area Components, describes 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 among the CMMI-SVC process areas.
• Chapter 6, Essays About CMMI for Services, consists of invited essays from contributing authors. The essays cover the use of CMMI-SVC, unusual applications, and use of CMMI-SVC in new domains.
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 example 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.
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. An example in which the order of the process areas by full process area title versus abbreviation is different is that 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 CMMI-SVC, V1.3.
• Appendix D, Glossary, defines many of the terms used in CMMI.
Finally, the Book Contributors section provides information about the book’s authors and those who contributed essays for Chapter 6.
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.
• 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.
• Finally, we included invited essays in Chapter 6 that consist of essays from partners, experienced users, experts in service management, and new users with advice for other new adotpers.
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.
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 process improvement that explains what CMMI is all about.
Next, skim Part Two, including generic goals and practices and specific goals and practices, to get a feel for the scope of the best practices contained in the model. Pay close attention to the purpose and introductory notes at the beginning of each process area.
In Part Three, look through the references in Appendix A and select additional sources you think would be beneficial to read before moving forward with 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 [ISO 2008c].
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 might 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 might notice a different level of detail in CMMI than in the models you are accustomed to using.
Next, review the glossary to understand how some terminology can differ from that used in the process improvement models you know. Many concepts are the same, but they might be called something different.
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 welcome. For information on how to provide feedback, see the CMMI website at www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/tools/cr/. If you have questions about CMMI, send e-mail to [email protected].