Custom Software and Offshore Development | LARION

How to use CMMI to bring your project management process to the next level

Are you stuck in a project management process crunch and try to find out how to get out from there? At the same time, are you trying to identify why your software quality stagnates or even degrades?

 CMMI® has started to play a key role in software development organizations worldwide. In order to compete with increasing software quality demands, many organizations claim or aim to move from their current CMM® level to the next higher one. CMMI is more comprehensive and rigid than CMM, as it covers 24 process areas versus CMM’s 18 process areas. In addition, CMMI has 460 practices versus CMM’s 316. The number of processes can be very overwhelming and it opens up the question how to best implement them. In order to stage the process improvement effort, CMMI offers five maturity levels that can only be reached one after the other. This paper focuses on how the Engineering organization at LogicVision Inc. improved its project management methods by using CMMI level 2 project management processes as a target. We start by explaining the basic structure of CMMI and describe the goals set for project management in CMMI maturity level 2. LogicVision selects the specific goals for project planning (PP) and project monitoring and control (PMC). Then these goals are transformed into requirements for project management templates.

 In order to explain how we meet these CMMI goals, we provide examples of the schedule and project plan template designed for engineering projects. As a result this paper demonstrates how CMMI level 2 goals for project management can be used as a tool to drive change and improve project management processes within an Engineering organization.

Related Article:

http://www.pmi.org/learning/library/cmmi-bring-pm-process-next-level-7538

More interesting resources

How to Form an Optimal Software Development Team Structure