Three Dimensions of Process Improvement Part II: The Personal Process

March 1998 Moving from “What” to “How” Although the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) provides a powerful improvement framework, its focus is necessarily on “what” organizations should do and not “how” they should do it. This is a direct result of the CMM’s original motivation to support the Department of Defense acquisition community. We knew management should set goals for their software work but we also knew that there were many ways to accomplish these goals. Above all, we knew no one was smart enough to define how to manage all software organizations. We thus kept the CMM focus on goals, with only generalized examples of the practices the goals implied. As organizations used the CMM, many had trouble applying the CMM principles. In small groups, for example, it is not generally possible to have dedicated process specialists, so every engineer must participate at least part time in process improvement. We kept describing to engineers what they ought to do and they kept asking us how to do it. Not only did this imply a need for much greater process detail, it also required that we deal more explicitly with the real practices of development engineers. We needed to show them precisely how to apply the CMM process principles. Because software development is a rich and sophisticated process, we realThree Dimensions of Process Improvement Part II: The Personal Process