Before putting this volume aside, consider the incredible amounts of creativity, imagination, composition, frustration, genius, and plain hard work that have led to the current CMMI Product Suite. Think about the millions of hours of effort spent as hundreds of people applied CMMI models and methods to improve thousands of organizations around the world. We continue to marvel at CMMI’s impact on technical and business enterprises, and we can only guess at what the future holds.
After a decade of development and use, the level of intellectual energy around the content, structure, and application of CMMI continues unabated. There is and always will be tension between the desire to improve, change, and grow, and the desire for stability and an avoidance of moving targets. Because both change and stability are fundamental to continuous process improvement, this tension is particularly strong within the CMMI community. The CMMI Product Suite must have sufficient stability so that an investment in improvement is not undercut by radical and pervasive changes to the models. At the same time, CMMI must change to incorporate new knowledge, proven experience, and the continuous creativity of those who practice and preach process improvement. As every proponent of continuous improvement knows, change focused on making improvements never ends. Surely this axiom applies to process improvement models just as much as it does to engineering development processes.
Throughout this book, we have tried to distill our experiences in responding to the need for an integrated approach to continuous process improvement. We hope that we have provided an accessible view into CMMI so that you can make more informed decisions about applying this model in your organization.
Chapter 1 began with a quote from W. Edwards Deming, which proves as useful at this juncture as it did for our opening act: “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” As you have survived your reading of this book, please let us know whether it has helped you on your path to improvement. Like processes and process improvement models, books about these topics can be improved. We look forward to hearing from you and using your suggestions in future editions.