Many organizations struggle with implementing process improvement. Senior managers set goals and timelines. Process groups develop improvement plans. Appraisals are held. But at a fundamental level, the engineers, project managers, and functional manager simply refuse to change their behaviors. The organization “goes through the motions”, but there is no visible progress, or simply rote adherence to process, not an embracing of mature practices. Most importantly, customers see no visible benefit. This presentation will: > Clearly explain the business value behind the CMMI practices and its positive impact on project and organization performance, in terms of cost, schedule, quality and risk. > Cover practical strategies and tactics for implementing the model to achieve these benefits. > Provide ways to explain the benefits to your customer.

1. Applying Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) for Your Company Processes: Using CMMI as a benchmarking tool to gain credibility with your customer 10 th BPM Summit: Mastering Lean Six Sigma and Process Excellence to Maximize Operational Goals 27-29 April 2009 Rick Hefner Northrop Grumman Corporation

8. Adopting any Best Practice Model The set of best practices Already performing Not performing Aware of Not aware of Perceive as valuable Don’t perceive as valuable Determine how best to perform in your environment Learn about successful implementations Eliminate barriers Eliminate biases

18. When Good Organizations Go Bad Focus on passing the appraisal, not understanding and deciding among possible interpretations Improvement goals are not set realistically Practitioners/customers perceive CMMI as more expensive Only some of the projects participate in the improvement effort The remaining projects don’t implement Only some of the projects get appraised People don’t learn or become proficient in the new behaviors Insufficient resources (e.g., training, QA, metrics, consultants) Benefits are not realized because projects do not start up effectively Management doesn’t enforce using processes on new programs Rick Hefner, “CMMI Horror Stories: When Good Projects Go Bad,” Software Engineering Process Group Conference , 6-9 March 2006