There has been quite a lot of talk in the technical community about the new CMMI version 1.3 and its possible impact (or not) to existing and planned business improvement programmes.   I have to confess to personally not getting too excited about the new release considering it to be primarily a technical release focussed on a bunch of synchronisations between the three constellations and clarifications to the high maturity practices.

Clearly the production of V1.3 has required a huge amount of analysis and will have been a non-trivial exercise, however what has resulted is an evolution not a revolution.   An evolution that results in three constellations that are more self-consistent which is important for those organisations that are making use of more than one constellation concurrently (something we at Lamri are seeing more of).   I have found the following SEI CMMI V1.3 sub-site to be very helpful.

On a related note this whole move to V1.3 is actually a huge vindication for CMMI and a reason why folk out there in the process improvement community who believe they need to commit to model based process improvement should “go adopt” CMMI rather than some of the competition (TMMI, P3M3 etc).  The content of V1.3 is not the point, instead it is the fact that the SEI actually listen to a vibrant process improvement community and take the trouble to continuously improve their model.   So CMMI has life, vibrancy and is fully supported and has an evolution path into the future.   Of course, I believe that competition is good as it drives innovation in the market place and hence benefit to the end consumer so perhaps we have to congratulate the SEI for creating CMM(I), as only successful ‘products’ get imitated or even dare I say it spawn a whole new market!

I’ve also had a couple of customers getting concerned if they have to budget now for the 1000 USD SCAMPI A charge the SEI are considering invoking in 2011.  I have to confess that the question of charges left me a little confused however the guys at the SEI were really helpful in explaining their thought processes to date to me so that:-

  • the SEI are still working on finalising this so when it is finalised it will be fully announced
  • the SEI believe the charge will be variable based perhaps on appraisal scope but will only be applied to SCAMPI A appraisals
  • this would NOT be invoked until the March / April 2011 timescale
  • the SEI understand that many organisations are even now planning appraisals for that sort of timeline and given the SEI are still working through the final details they will be pragmatic in the interpretation of this to focus on “new appraisals” planned after that date

So after this discussion with the SEI I was able to let my Customers know they did not have to worry about the proposed charge as they were planning their SCAMPI A’s now.   I guess the moral here is that this is an evolving story so keep checking the SEI CMMI site for up to date announcements on the subject.