IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE, A MAP WON’T HELP - THE CAPABILITY MATURITY MODEL

IN CONTEXT FOCUSBusiness processes KEY DATES1899 US engineer and management consultant Henry Gantt develops the Gantt chart to illustrate a project schedule. 1970s Data-flow diagrams are developed to allow structured analysis of how data moves from one process to another. 1979 Philip B. Crosby develops a quality-management maturity grid in his book Quality is Free. 1988 The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is described by Watts S. Humphrey in an article published in the journal IEEE Software. 2003 In Business Process Management is a Team Sport, Andrew Spanyi claims that strategy should drive business process design, which, in turn, should drive organizational design. Business processes are a series of actions taken to achieve an outcome. The objective might be to produce a product, to pay an invoice, or to serve a customer, for example. Adam Smith was one of the first people to describe business processes, when he dissected the many manufacturing processes used in an 18th-century pin factory. From describing the different actions, he developed the idea of division of labor, where work can be divided into a set of simple tasks performed by specialized workers, in sequence. Continuous improvement The sequence of steps in a process can often be visualized as a flow chart. As Watts Humphrey, inventor of the capability maturity model (CMM), pointed out, it is always “good to know where you are” in the process. Humphrey developed the idea that continuous process improvement is based on many small evolutionary steps, rather than large, revolutionary innovations. His CMM provides a framework for organizing these evolutionary steps into five levels of development, each of which prepares the way for the next. The CMM was developed Adam Smith observed workers making pins in a pin factory and realized that if the process were split into separate, specialized steps, productivity would increase by 240 to 4,800 times. See also: Keep evolving business practice 48–51 ■ Reinventing and adapting 52–57 ■ Simplify processes 296–99 ■ Kaizen 302–09 ■ Critical path analysis 328–29 ■ Benchmarking 330–31WORKING WITH A VISIONwith funding from the US Air Force, and was used as a model for the military to evaluate software subcontractors. The model’s original goal was to improve software-development processes, but it is now applied as a general model of the maturity of processes. It is often used in evaluating IT service management, for example, or more widely across organizational systems. The CMM describes five levels of increasing maturity through which an organization or team manages its processes: in the first level, work is conducted in a chaotic and illdefined way; in the second level, processes are put in place and adhered to with some discipline, and previous successes can be repeated; in the third level, processes are defined, standardized, and can be proactively implemented; in the fourth level, they are managed and monitored; and in the fifth level, they undergo regular improvement through monitoring and feedback. Comparing industries The CMM can be used to compare different organizations in similar industries. For example, two companies could be compared on the basis of their softwaredevelopment processes. Increasingly, IT projects, which involve complex software development and new system implementation, can impact a company’s operation and profitability, as they affect all of the company’s departments. The strength of CMM is its effective measurement of the standardization of an organization’s processes. This is why the model moved from being used to assess software development, to applications in project management, risk management, personnel management, and systems engineering. It provides a starting point for managers looking to improve a company’s processes and a framework for prioritizing actions. It also offers a way of defining what “improvement” might really mean.BSc and MSc in physics before completing an MBA in manufacturing at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. After graduating, he joined the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, where he founded the Software Process Program, which focused on understanding and managing the software engineering process. 

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This work resulted in the development of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), for which he is best known, and inspired the subsequent development of the Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software Process (TSP), which was later adopted by IT companies Adobe, Intuit, and Oracle. Humphrey was awarded a National Medal of Technology in 2003 for his work in software engineering. With his wife, Barbara, he had seven children, and died at his home in Florida on October 28, 2010, at 83. Key works 1995 A Discipline for Software Engineering 1999 Introduction to the Team Software Process 2005 PSP, A Self-Improvement Process for Software Engineers