I recently worked with a client on their implementation of CMMI-ACQ. After much hard work and courage they were rated as a maturity level 2 organisation late last year. Along the way they accumulated many better practices, benefits and a better understanding of how their own organisation needs to work with partners and suppliers. So after this success I was curious to know which other organisations had gone down the CMMI-ACQ path and published their appraisal results.
I was well and truly shocked to see the numbers from the SEI’s PARS system displayed on my laptop. In the past 3 years only 10 organisations globally have invested in CMMI-ACQ to improve their acquisition of products and services to achieve a maturity level rating of 2 or greater whilst CMMI-DEV is into the thousands and the relative newcomer, CMMI-SVC, is almost a hundred.
2009 = 3
2010 = 3
2011 = 4
So the gap between the potential and benefits that CMMI-ACQ delivers seems to me to be disproportionate to its rate of adoption. Why?
I’m sure there are a multitude of reasons but here are a couple I think could be major causes. There is a lingering perception of Capability Maturity Models as being only for software engineering organisations developing their own software? Certainly the old SA-CMM focussed on software acquisition but surely the introduction of CMMI and the subsequent introduction of CMMI-ACQ and CMMI-SVC addressed this by drawing attention to all of the CMMI constellations. This could be a reason why Chief Procurement Officers are not being properly engaged in the process improvement strategy to explore the benefits of CMMI-ACQ?
Or is it a result of acquisition being driven solely by cost reduction strategies that de-emphasise the need for improved or optimised practices for engaging suppliers/partners throughout a product or project’s lifecycle.
Whatever the cause of the low adoption rates somebody ought to mount an expedition to the lost world to enable us all to rediscover CMMI-ACQ.
