Getting CMMI Certified in Kansas City, Missouri (MO)

CMMI or the Capability Maturity Model Integration is a process-level appraisal and training program. The program is administered by the CMMI institute which is a subsidiary of ISACA and was created at the CMU (Carnegie Mellon University). It is a requirement by most US government contracts especially the ones in software management.

According to CMU, organizations can use CMMI to guide process improvement across the division, project, and even the whole organization. The model has five maturity levels which include the Initial, Managed, Defined, Quantitatively Managed & Optimizing. CMU has registered CMMI in the United States’ Patent & Trademark office. Therefore, it is a genuine standard that your organization can take full advantage of.

The Main Areas of CMMI

CMMI originally addresses three main areas of interest. These include;

1. Product & service development i.e., CMMI for Development or CMMI-DEV
2. Service establishment, management i.e., CMMI for services or CMMI-SVC, and finally.
3. Product and service acquisition i.e., CMMI for acquisition or CMMI-ACQ

In the previous version of CMMI, each of these three areas has its own separate model. However, all of them have now been merged into one single model.

CMMI was created by a group from the government, industry, and the SEI (Software Engineering Institute) at CMU. CMMI gives guidance for improving or developing processes that meet the organization’s business goals. The organization can also use the CMMI model as a framework for appraising the organizations’ process maturity. The whole CMMI product suite, by January 2013, was transferred to the CMMI Institute from SEI. This is an organization that was fully created at Carnegie Mellon.

The CMMI project developed CMMI with the aim of improving the usability of the maturity models through the integration of several different models into a single framework.  The main sponsors of the project were the National Defense Industry Association and the OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense).

CMMI is a successor to the CMM (capability maturity model) or software. The creation of CMM was from 1987 all the way to 1997. The first version was released in 2002 and the second version in 2006 while the third was published in November 2010. Some of the major changes in the CMMI including supporting agile software development, high maturity practice improvements, and representation alignment which is both continuous and staged.