CMMI has two models that can be adopted by any organization that is looking to improve its processes. At a very basic level, CMMI is nothing but implementing a bunch of “practices” that are necessary to achieve a high level of maturity and capability. These practices are grouped together into “process areas,” where each process area consists of a set of related practices. Each process area further belongs to four main threads, and these are Engineering Management Process Management Project Management Support The CMMI stages help organizations systematically improve their processes, and a CMMI diagram in software engineering visually represents these maturity levels for better understanding and implementation. When comparing the CMMI staged vs continuous representation, it is important to understand how these models help organizations improve their processes, especially in the context of CMMI certification in the Netherlands. Depending on what your business goals are, you can opt for a continuous or staged representation. Many software organizations pursue CMMI certification in Mexico to strengthen their process maturity, often adopting the staged model to achieve progressive capability improvements. Continuous Representation Continuous representation of CMMI is used by organizations that want to improve aspects of the organization that are most critical for their business needs. Within an IT organization context, if you think that “time to market” is most critical to your business, then automatically you will only want to improve the processes that directly impact the time to market. These will fall within the project management thread only. Thus, continuous representation of CMMI is ideal for you, as it gives the flexibility of doing this. In a staged representation, organizations follow predefined maturity levels, whereas the CMMI staged vs continuous representation debate highlights whether progress should be assessed by overall maturity or by capability in individual process areas. Ons bedrijf streeft naar CMMI-certificering in Nederland om het vereiste CMMI Level 3 te behalen voor verdere procesoptimalisatie. Another thing that continuous representation allows you to do , is that it allows you to mature different processes with a thread at different rates. So, if your organization is releasing “buggy” software, then you may think that you want to improve only upon Process and Project Quality Assurance (PPQA), Verification (VER) and Validation (VAL) process areas. It a newer approach and this representation does not leads to a certification. Rather than having a organization maturity level, each process area has a capability level from 0-5, where 0 stands for “Incomplete” & 5 stands for “Optimizing”. Thus, the same organization can demonstrate capability level 3 in Project Planning (PP) and Capability level 1 or 0 in Supplier Agreement Management (SAM). Continuous model is mainly used for IT departments within non IT organizations rather than IT companies. A necessary precondition for an organization to choose this model, is that they should be aware of the processes and should be sure about what they want to improve. Staged Representation While continuous representation improves capability of specific processes within the organization, staged representation matures the organization as a whole. It a proven path that an organization can adapt in order to incrementally improve itself. This representation divides the process improvement effort into five distinct maturity levels (i.e. from 1 through 5) where each level has some predefined process area which an organization will need to implement. Process areas within a lower level forms the foundation of process area at a higher level. Thus a maturity level 3 means that the organization implements all process areas within Level 3 and the capability level of processes within Level 2 has also been increased to Level 3. Staged representation has been designed after collecting data from various organization and it has a demonstrated returns on investments. The best thing about staged representation is that it provides the organization with a sort of map which can guide them through process improvement. We have selected the staged model as our road map for process improvement with a target to acquire a maturity level 3.
