Achieving Delivery Excellence Using the Capability Maturity Model Integration

A framework like Capability Maturity Model Integration can be an important tool in achieving delivery excellence and high performance—but companies must be aware of the pitfalls and see it as part of a complete program.

Service delivery organizations are constantly looking for ways to deliver their services better, faster and cheaper.

According to a CIO survey report conducted by Accenture, high-performing IT organizations who master this "spend significantly less time maintaining and fixing systems and significantly more time building new systems." The difficulty comes in balancing these potentially conflicting goals in order to ultimately deliver excellent service and meet or exceed customer requirements.

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®) has taken a leading position for systems development and maintenance. CMMI builds on the success of its predecessor, the CMM for Software, which has been the global standard for software development excellence since the early 1990s.

Simply put, CMMI is a set of guidelines for 25 process areas in systems development and maintenance best practices. The premise of the model is that the most successful systems development and maintenance organizations are those that do these 25 things well. Higher maturity organizations have more consistent results and proactively improve their quality.

Accenture used CMMI to ensure our global methods meet or exceed industry standards and to drive consistency across our internal groups—thereby achieving delivery excellence throughout our business.

We found there were a number of benefits of using CMMI as one part of a well thought out and executed delivery excellence program. A key benefit of using CMMI is process industrialization: We used CMMI for this purpose and realized 5:1 return on investment (ROI).

There are several other benefits that have been reported in a Software Engineering Institute (SEI) study of CMMI implementations, including:

• Cost: 4.5 percent decline in overhead and up to 33 percent decrease in the cost to fix defects.
• Schedule: 30 percent increase in productivity, 50 percent reduction in release time, increase of milestones met from 50 percent to 95 percent.
• Quality: reduction in defects found from 6.6 to 2.1 per thousand lines of code.
• Customer Satisfaction: increase in client satisfaction scores and award fees.
• Return on Investment: 5:1 to 13:1 ROI.

Not every organization can expect the same degree of benefits.

In our experience, the best way to understand which benefits might apply to your organization is to conduct a baseline assessment and use information specific to your organization to evaluate opportunities for improvement.

The model itself provides a list of requirements—not instructions—on how to implement processes that meet those requirements. Because of this lack of implementation guidance, organizations can make some critical mistakes, including setting the wrong or incomplete goals.

The following are some examples of business goals that can be supported by CMMI:

• Increase customer satisfaction by increasing the quality of your systems that support the customer directly, or that support employees who interact with the customer.
• Increase the responsiveness of your organization by reducing the delivery time of your systems' development projects.
• Increase the productivity of the systems organization, or conversely, reduce the cost of the systems organization while maintaining the same delivery speed and quality.

Business and governments that are committed to improving their performance will find that CMMI can help support a program to achieve customer satisfaction, competitive superiority—and, ultimately, high performance.