Whether your business is developing high-tech systems, consumer software, or IT services, you want to ensure the highest quality product or service reaches your customer on time. Using CMMI-DEV as part of a process improvement program in your development organization can help you achieve on-time delivery and high quality, especially if your product or service relies heavily on software.

CMMI-DEV is used for process improvement in development organizations. CMMI-DEV is a model or collection of "best practices" that organizations follow to dramatically improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of their product and service development work. CMMI-DEV also is supported by training courses and appraisal methodologies to help organizations objectively measure their improvement progress.

CMMI-DEV guidance covers the lifecycles of products and services from conception through delivery and maintenance. CMMI-DEV best practices are flexible enough to apply to a variety of industries, yet stable and consistent enough to provide a benchmark against which your organization can measure and compare itself.

Adopting CMMI-DEV is a solid, high-return investment that your organization can make to ensure long-term enduring results. The business benefits experienced by organizations using CMMI-DEV in their process improvement programs include the following:

• Better customer satisfaction
• Increased quality
• More accurate schedules
• Lower development costs
• Substantial return on investment
• Improved employee morale and reduced turnover

CMMI-DEV based process improvement includes identifying your organization's process strengths and weaknesses and making process changes to turn weaknesses into strengths. CMMI-DEV best practices and process improvement goals are organized into intuitive groups called "process areas." Your organization chooses its path to excellence by focusing on the process areas most important to its business objectives.

Adopting CMMI-DEV for process improvement is a low-risk activity because you can count on significant and measurable benefits. CMMI-DEV best practices are not new business objectives to be achieved by your organization; instead CMMI-DEV provides a framework for accomplishing existing business objectives on time and on budget. CMMI-DEV based process improvement doesn't require special tools or exact approaches. The return on investment of such a program more than pays for the monetary investment required.

The SEI is pleased to announce an upcoming offering of the Introduction to CMMI-SVC pilot course in Washington, DC. This three-day course will occur December 15-17, 2009. Additionally, this pilot course is deeply discounted to $900 for all attendees who register by November 30, and to $1000 for attendees registering after November 30. If you would like to register for this course, please fill out this registration form and return it to courseregistration@sei.cmu.edu.

In lean economic times, service organizations, which make up 80% of the world economy, can benefit by using process improvement to make the most of their resources to achieve desired business results. CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC) is a guide to help service provider organizations reduce costs, improve quality, and improve the predictability of schedules.
Customers are requesting that their service providers demonstrate a CMMI rating or capability profile, but attempts to use CMMI-DEV in a service setting can distort the integrity of appraisal results. Service providers deserve the same opportunity that the development community has enjoyed for years. They deserve the opportunity to improve their processes based on community models of practice that specifically address the interests and concerns of service providers. CMMI-SVC is the model of practice that service organizations have been waiting for.
CMMI-SVC provides best practices that service providers can use when they

• Decide what services they should be providing, define standard services, and let people know about them
• Make sure they have everything they need to deliver a service, including people, processes, consumables, and equipment
• Get new systems in place, change existing systems, retire obsolete systems, all while making sure nothing goes terribly wrong with the service
• Set up agreements, take care of service requests, and operate service systems
• Make sure they have the resources needed to deliver services and that services are available when needed-at an appropriate cost
• Handle what goes wrong-and prevent it from going wrong in the first place if possible
• Ensure they are ready to recover from potential disasters and get back to delivering services if the disaster occurs

Were you ever surprised when you received a final product from a supplier? Did it not perform as you expected? Did it cost more than expected? Was it not delivered on time? Have you been dissatisfied with a supplier's services? What processes are you improving to help take control of the relationship with your suppliers?

CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ) is a best practices model that can help you improve relationships with your suppliers by helping you improve your own processes. It can be used to increase your control of projects, better manage global sourcing of products and services, and more successfully acquire solutions that meet your organization's needs.

CMMI for Acquisition is based on the CMMI Framework. The CMMI for Acquisition model has 22 process areas: six are specific to acquisition practices and sixteen are shared with other CMMI models.
The six process areas that are specific to acquisition practices are

• Acquisition Requirements Development (ARD)
• Solicitation and Supplier Agreement Development (SSAD)
• Agreement Management (AM)
• Acquisition Technical Management (ATM)
• Acquisition Verification (AVER)
• Acquisition Validation (AVAL)

Additionally, the model includes guidance on

• Acquisition Strategy
• Typical Supplier Deliverables
• Transition to operations and support
• Integrated teams

The sixteen shared process areas include practices for project management, organizational process management, and infrastructure and support.

The COPC® Family of Standards is the most prestigious and rigorous measurement system in the call center industry. Our standards provide a high performance set of global best practices and benchmarks that simultaneously increase service quality and customer satisfaction while lowering costs. For over a decade, the COPC® Family of Standards has been used to boost efficiency and improve performance in Call Centers, E-Commerce Centers and Transaction Processing Operations worldwide

The COPC-2000® CSP Standard is a Performance Management Framework designed to deliver results in Customer Service Provider (CSP) contact center environments including Call Centers, E-Commerce Centers and Transaction Processing Operations. It is relied on as the global standard for implementing contact center best practices that improve performance metrics in customer satisfaction and service, inbound and outbound sales, dispatch, collections, retention, remittance processing, fulfillment and other related service operations.

The COPC® Certification Process includes professional consulting, training, installation, and benchmarking services designed to infuse your operations with a rigorous measurement system by which to analyze and improve all customer-touch activities.

COPC® Certification to the COPC-2000® CSP Standard ensures the COPC® Performance Management System is properly implemented and producing results.

The COPC-2000 VMO Standard for Vendor Management Organizations sets forth minimum requirements for buyers of third party customer contact center services. These requirements fall across four categories - leadership and planning, key business processes, key people processes and goals. When met, these guidelines ensure the cost-effective, results-oriented management of outsourced Customer Service Providers (CSPs).

Developed by leading buyers of CSP services, the COPC-2000 VMO Standard is closely aligned with the COPC-2000® CSP Standard and provides vendor management organizations with the key strategies and performance metrics needed to manage their relationships for optimal performance and customer satisfaction.

Do you need to improve your management of people to get full advantage from your software development capability? Can you attract, train, deploy, and retain the people you need to develop software in today's competitive market? With the help of the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI), many organizations have made improvements in their software and systems processes and practices. They have also discovered that their continued improvement requires significant changes in the way they manage people.

The People CMM is a maturity framework that describes the key elements of managing and developing the workforce of an organization. It describes an evolutionary improvement path from an ad hoc approach to managing the work-force, to a mature, disciplined development of the knowledge, skills, and motivation of the people that fuels enhanced business performance.

• characterize the maturity of their human resource practices
• set priorities for improving the competence of its work-force
• integrate competence growth with process improvement
• establish a culture of workforce excellence

The People CMM publications and training will support incorporating people management capabilities into software improvement programs by communicating a model that complements the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI), and by making available an appraisal method that can be used alone or integrated with existing process appraisal methods.

The People CMM is designed to guide organizations in selecting activities for improving their workforce practices based on the current maturity of their workforce practices. By concentrating on a focused set of practices and working aggressively to install them, organizations can steadily improve their level of talent and make continuous and lasting gains in their performance. The People CMM guides an organization through a series of increasingly sophisticated practices and techniques for developing its overall work-force. These practices have been chosen from experience as those that have significant impact on individual, team, and organizational performance.

The People Capability Maturity Model (People CMM) adapts the maturity framework of the Capability Maturity Model for Software (CMM) [Paulk 95], to managing and developing an organization's work force. The motivation for the People CMM is to radically improve the ability of software organizations to attract, develop, motivate, organize, and retain the talent needed to continuously improve software development capability. The People CMM is designed to allow software organizations to integrate work-force improvement with software process improvement programs guided by the SW-CMM. The People CMM can also be used by any kind of organization as a guide for improving their people-related and work-force practices.

Based on the best current practices in the fields such as human resources and organizational development, the People CMM provides organizations with guidance on how to gain control of their processes for managing and developing their work force. The People CMM helps organizations to characterize the maturity of their work-force practices, guide a program of continuous work-force development, set priorities for immediate actions, integrate work-force development with process improvement, and establish a culture of software engineering excellence. It describes an evolutionary improvement path from ad hoc, inconsistently performed practices, to a mature, disciplined development of the knowledge, skills, and motivation of the work force, just as the CMM describes an evolutionary improvement path for the software processes within an organization.

The People CMM consists of five maturity levels that lay successive foundations for continuously improving talent, developing effective teams, and successfully managing the people assets of the organization. Each maturity level is a well-defined evolutionary plateau that institutionalizes a level of capability for developing the talent within the organization.

Except for Level 1, each maturity level is decomposed into several key process areas that indicate the areas an organization should focus on to improve its workforce capability. Each key process area is described in terms of the key practices that contribute to satisfying its goals. The key practices describe the infrastructure and activities that contribute most to the effective implementation and institutionalization of the key process area.

• Initial
• Repeatable. The key process areas at Level 2 focus on instilling basic discipline into workforce activities. They are:
  • Work Environment
  • Communications
  • Staffing
  • Performance Management
  • Training
  • Compensation
• Defined. The key process areas at Level 3 address issues surrounding the identification of the organization's primary competencies and aligning its people management activities with them. They are:
  • Knowledge and Skills Analysis
  • Workforce Planning
  • Competency Development
  • Career Development
  • Competency-Based Practices
  • Participatory Culture
• Managed. The key process areas at Level 4 focus on quantitatively managing organizational growth in people management capabilities and in establishing competency-based teams. They are:
  • Mentoring
  • Team Building
  • Team-Based Practices
  • Organizational Competency Management
  • Organizational
  • Performance Alignment
• Optimizing. The key process areas at Level 5 cover the issues that address continuous improvement of methods for developing competency, at both the organizational and the individual level. They are:
  • Personal Competency Development
  • Coaching
  • Continuous Workforce Innovation

ITSqc develops capability models to improve the relationship between service providers and their clients. The eSourcing Capability Model for Service Providers (eSCM-SP) v2 was released in April 2004. The eSourcing Capability Model for Client Organizations (eSCM-CL) was released in September 2006. The need for an additional capability model concerned with eSecurity is now under investigation.
Organizations are increasingly delegating IT-intensive business activities to external service providers to take advantage of new growth in the global telecommunications infrastructure. The business processes being outsourced range from routine and non-critical tasks, to strategic processes that directly impact revenues. Managing and meeting client expectations is a major challenge in these business relationships, and examples of failure abound.

The eSourcing Capability Model for Service Providers (eSCM-SP) helps sourcing organizations manage and reduce their risks and improve their capabilities across the entire sourcing life-cycle. The Model's Practices can be thought of as the best practices associated with successful sourcing relationships. It addresses the critical issues related to IT-enabled sourcing (eSourcing) for both outsourced and in-sourced (shared services) agreements.

Service providers use the eSCM-SP and its accompanying Capability Determination methods to evaluate their eSourcing capabilities, and to become eSCM-SP certified. This status provides an advantage over their competitors.

The eSCM-SP has been designed to complement existing quality models so that service providers can capitalize on their previous improvement efforts. A series of documents comparing the eSCM-SP with other models and standards has been developed.

Each of the Model's 84 Practice is distributed along three dimensions: Sourcing Life-cycle, Capability Area, and Capability Level.Most quality models focus only on design and delivery capabilities, but the eSCM-SP's Sourcing Life-cycle includes not only delivery, but also Initiation and Completion of the contract. The two phases are often the ones most critical to successful sourcing relationships. The Sourcing Life-cycle also includes Overall Practices.

Capability Areas provide logical groupings of Practices to help users better remember and intellectually manage the content of the Model. Service providers can then build or demonstrate capabilities in a particular critical-sourcing function. The ten Capability Areas are Knowledge Management, People Management, Performance Management, Relationship Management, Technology Management, Threat Management, Service Transfer, Contracting, Service Design & Deployment, and Service Delivery.The five eSCM-SP Capability Levels indicate the level of an organization's capability. Level 1 indicates that the organization is providing a service. A Level 2 organization has procedures in place to enable it to consistently meet its clients' requirements. At Level 3, an organization is able to manage its performance consistently across engagements. Level 4 requires that an organization is able to add value to its services through innovation. Service providers at Level 5 have proven that they can sustain excellence over a period of at least two years.

Overview

Over the past several years, all kinds of organizations, from manufacturing firms to banks and hospitals, have delegated their computer-intensive activities to external service providers because they are focusing on core competencies or they lack their own in-house capabilities. In many cases, they have not been satisfied with the results. The actions of both the client organization and the service provider in these sourcing relationships are critical for success. With that in mind, ITSqc developed the eSourcing Capability Model for Client Organizations (eSCM-CL), a best practices model that enables client organizations to appraise and improve their capability to foster the development of more effective relationships and to better manage these relationships. This new model allows client organizations to continuously evolve, improve, and innovate their capabilities to develop stronger, longer-term, and more trusting relationships with their service providers.

Existing frameworks do not comprehensively address the best practices needed by client organizations to successfully source IT-enabled services. Our preliminary investigations showed that most current quality models do not address all phases of sourcing process (sourcing analysis, initiation, delivery, and completion).
The eSourcing Capability Model for Client Organizations (eSCM-CL) addresses a full range of client-organization tasks, ranging from developing the organization's sourcing strategy, planning for sourcing and service provider selection, initiating an agreement with service providers, managing service delivery, and completing the agreement.

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is the world's largest developer and publisher of International Standards.

ISO is a network of the national standards institutes of 162 countries, one member per country, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, that coordinates the system.

ISO is a non-governmental organization that forms a bridge between the public and private sectors. On the one hand, many of its member institutes are part of the governmental structure of their countries, or are mandated by their government. On the other hand, other members have their roots uniquely in the private sector, having been set up by national partnerships of industry associations.

Therefore, ISO enables a consensus to be reached on solutions that meet both the requirements of business and the broader needs of society.

IT Service Management (ITSM) derives enormous benefits from a best practice approach. Because ITSM is driven both by technology and the huge range of organisational environments in which it operates, it is in a state of constant evolution. Best practice, based on expert advice and input from ITIL users is both current and practical, combining the latest thinking with sound, common sense guidance.

ITIL® is the only consistent and comprehensive documentation of best practice for IT Service Management. Used by thousands of organisations around the world, a whole ITIL philosophy has grown up around the guidance contained within the ITIL books and the supporting professional qualification scheme.
ITIL consists of a series of books giving guidance on the provision of quality IT services, and on the accommodation and environmental facilities needed to support IT. ITIL has been developed in recognition of organisations' growing dependency on IT and embodies best practices for IT Service Management.

The ethos behind the development of ITIL is the recognition that organisations are becoming increasingly dependent on IT in order to satisfy their corporate aims and meet their business needs. This leads to an increased requirement for high quality IT services.

ITIL provides a systematic and professional approach to the management of IT service provision. Adopting its guidance offers users a huge range of benefits that include:

• reduced costs
• improved IT services through the use of proven best practice processes
• improved customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery
• standards and guidance
• improved productivity
• improved use of skills and experience
• improved delivery of third party services through the specification of ITIL or ISO 20000 as the standard for service delivery in services procurements.