Just a short post building on my previous thoughts.  I’ve found the following helpful “Guide to Supplier Appraisals” on Supply Management’s website at http://www.supplymanagement.com/resources/how-to/guide-to-supplier-appraisal/.  Its written from the professional buyer’s perspective and discusses a rationale for when it would be appropriate to appraise one’s potential suppliers.  Within the context of this community – appraisals often comprise commercial scrutiny, evidence of quality standards such as ISO and some evidence of technical and managerial competence.  From my perspective an interesting point is that clearly the buying community understand how challenging largely bespoke IT developments can be.  They also appreciate that its abundantly good practice to put prospective supplier’s under considerable scrutiny.   On the other hand over in our Development pond it is a truism demonstrated with concrete evidence that CMMI does improve and does drive improved predictability, reliability etc.  In other words a large slug of the characteristics that our professional buyer is looking for.  Why then are these two worlds so far apart? Why when assessing appropriate IT Development “heavy” acquisitions does the buying community not make use of focussed CMMI assessments to gain an deeper understanding of a prospective supplier’s actual capability to deliver the “thing” they are bidding to deliver?  I appreciate there have been scattered instances of this but the curious point (to my mind) is that nowhere on the professional procurement related sites is this outlined – even if just from the perspective of here is a useful tool given the appropriate environment.   As ever thoughts welcome …