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Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®)
As WareOnEarth Communications, Inc. (WCI) evolves, we face the challenges of remaining competitive and reducing
costs; one means to address these challenges is to improve processes. Process improvement has proven to increase
an organization's product and service quality even as they strive to achieve business objectives. Accordingly, a
corporate Process Improvement (PI) effort for administrative and engineering processes is implemented at WCI.
While WCI has always modeled its business practices from widely accepted industry standards such as ISO and
IEEE, the multi-disciplined nature of WCI’s business requires a more diverse approach to process management.
Because of the company’s many projects involving systems, security, and software engineering, WCI management
made the commitment to transition to the CMMI®, with the expected result of reducing redundancy and
inconsistency and achieving a greater return on investments.
The purpose of CMMI is to provide guidance to improve business processes and enable an organization to manage
the development, acquisition, and maintenance of its products and services. CMMI places proven practices into
a structure in order to help an organization assess its organizational maturity and process area capability,
establish priorities for improvement, and guide the implementation of improvements.
Benchmarking progress in an organization’s process improvement is achieved via a rigorous, formal appraisal
method called the Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement (SCAMPISM), whereby the organization
ascertains maturity level scores or a capability level profile. This form of benchmarking is valuable within
WCI to identify process improvement opportunities as well as externally to prove WCI’s organizational maturity
to existing/potential clients and suppliers. CMMI contains five numbered maturity levels that focus on an
organization’s ability to pursue process improvement. Using common features, generic goals and generic
practices, organizations can improve their processes and evaluate their progress as they move from one maturity
level to another. In January 2005, WCI began tailoring and streamlining business processes in a concerted
effort to achieve successful CMMI appraisals.
