Background

USA enjoys a strong heritage in software process improvement, including being the first SW-CMM Level 5 project. In 1989, the Flight Software project earned the highest rating, maturity level 5. The Flight Software project was described in The Capability Maturity Model: Guidelines for Improving the Software Process [SEI 95]. United Space Alliance embraces the SW-CMM and uses it as the basis for corporate-wide software process-improvement planning. USA has not previously used the Systems Engineering Capability Model (EIA 731) [EIA 98].

USA Mission and Vision

The United Space Alliance vision is to be the world leader in space operations on Earth, in orbit, and beyond. The USA mission is to provide safe, high-quality, best-value space operations services to government and commercial customers. To achieve the vision and mission, the company established six key goals.

• Provide for safe operations for all aspects of our business.

• Achieve excellent customer satisfaction and program performance.

• Improve, grow, and diversify our business.

• Be the company of choice for our employees.

• Contribute positively to the enrichment of our communities.

• Provide excellent financial returns to our stakeholders.

Deploying Company Goals

One of the concepts in CMMI is to explicitly link activities and business objectives. USA supports this concept through the Vision Support Plan, which defines the company's shared vision. To align all goals in the organization to achieve the corporate vision, this initiative links company goals and individual department and employee goals. Further, this initiative ensures that all employees understand how their work helps the company reach its shared vision.

Each year, executive managers establish goals to support the organization's vision and mission. Process owners establish the company-level goals for their disciplines. The owner of each company goal must define the goal, collect requirements, and track comments for that goal.

Managers then use these higher level goals to develop supporting goals and initiatives for their areas. The Vision Support Plan goal-deployment process requires a standard metric for measuring the progress of each goal/objective/initiative and each related year-end metric target. This same process of refining higher level goals to supporting goals continues until each employee's goals are defined.

Each owner of a goal/objective/initiative must monitor the status of progress using stoplight colors (red, yellow, and green).

Green: Performance met the target or is projected to meet the target.

Yellow: Performance is projected to miss the target, but a corrective action plan is in place.

Red: Performance did not meet the target or is projected to not meet the target.

If the status is yellow or red, a plan of action must be available for review and attention is given to the goal/objective/initiative.

In addition to entering information into the Vision Support Plan Web-based system, managers display information on bulletin boards known as Vision Support Plan wall boards. Each department maintains a Vision Support Plan wall board that displays its progress toward its goals and stimulates discussion of related work. Progress toward USA goals is reviewed periodically by management at all levels of the company. Once a quarter, the senior management team formally reviews progress by reviewing the wall boards with all members of the department.

Process Ownership

To achieve corporate goals, USA initiated a number of process-improvement activities that are organized around designated process owners. These process owners are the focus of technical process excellence and employee development. Process owners are identified for Software, Engineering, Quality Assurance, Process and Manufacturing, Logistics, and Program Management disciplines and report to the chief executive officer of USA.

Under the United Space Alliance Process Owners Charter, each process owner must accomplish the following:

• Develop and maintain technical processes that support core competencies.

• Develop and maintain core technical processes and tools.

• Ensure that technical processes are implemented consistently according to policy.

• Look for cross-program synergy and horizontal integration opportunities, including identifying and developing best internal practices for company-wide application.

• Assure availability and efficient use of technical resources.

• Support new business development.

• Infuse technology throughout the company for tools within his or her area.

Under the leadership of the Software process owner, USA is currently in the midst of rolling out a SW-CMM based set of standard process assets as a part of the software process improvement initiative. At some point, CMMI practices that are different from the SW-CMM will be folded into these assets.

USA will continue to use the SW-CMM as a basis for improvement since a significant investment has already been made. That is, current plans are not being sidetracked or drastically revised to change course and start immediate widespread adoption of CMMI. Transition to CMMI will be a gradual move of the entire software process from SW-CMM to CMMI within the next four years.

Since most of the Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG) representatives attended the training course, "Introduction to CMMI," they are familiar with CMMI and the differences between the SW-CMM and CMMI. The SEPG is able to easily incorporate the aspects of CMMI that are compatible with SW-CMM. For example, the standard software process may require review of activities with higher level management (CMMI oriented) instead of dictating review of activities with project management and senior management (SW-CMM oriented).

The USA Engineering Process Owner is currently evaluating the more immediate use of CMMI for process definition. Presumably this approach will allow CMMI to become a binding agent to unite the work of software and engineering process owners when the two separate improvement initiatives converge. The process owners currently coordinate activities at regular face-to-face meetings. CMMI, however, has not yet been adopted as the company standard to span multiple company-wide processes.

Since the case study was conducted, the Logistics process owner has begun applying a CMMI model during process definition activities. This area is related to neither systems nor software and was not a target area for which CMMI was anticipated to be applied.

Because of the tight relationship between NASA and USA, NASA policy strongly influences USA policy and process direction. The USA decisions to adopt SW-CMM and subsequently CMMI are influenced heavily by NASA decisions. Policies are pending at NASA that will more broadly apply CMMI across the agency.