Next Steps

Now that USA has experienced the flavor of CMMI, the company is better educated and equipped to move forward with broader deployment when the decision is made to transition from the CMM to CMMI at USA. The case study results include a number of identified weaknesses in the projects examined.

The first next step is to communicate the results. The team will provide the projects with more detailed feedback on the results of the case study, including the identified weaknesses. The two projects will then be able to prepare action plans and to address the significant weaknesses.

The case study team will also more broadly communicate the case study results within USA beyond just the two projects. A starting point will be to review the results with the USA SEPG. In this forum, the group can discuss some of the known organizational weaknesses that apply to the USA software process as well as the activities that should be undertaken at the company level for organizational practices in the future. For example, the case study identified areas in the corporate software policy that need to be upgraded to address the "new" PAs in CMMI.

The second next step is to expand the use of CMMI. Adoption of CMMI will require that a strategy be developed for corporate-wide adoption and will require coordination of USA process owners regarding how CMMI will apply to their separate processes and how it will apply to overlapping or common USA processes.