Chapter 8: Understanding Maturity Level 5: Optimizing

Summary

The previous version of the CMM for Software said of Level 4 Keep It Simple. Organizations involved in piloting CMMI have admitted that the bar has been raised significantly. Do we believe that measurement is necessary? Absolutely! However, Level 4 is where senior management commitment and participation really come to the forefront. Business decisions are supposed to be made based on the numbers . Have you ever sat in any senior- or executive-level meetings? You are lucky if you get ten minutes with these people. And they are not overly fond of viewing slide after slide of esoteric charts and graphs. They want to know the bottom line that is, are we making money? And the one chart that they all love, which is not particularly popular in the world of statistics, is the pie chart.

Our recommendation is still to start simple. If you can then refine your approaches and include more complicated approaches as needed, then fine go for it. But most small organizations will find Maturity Level 4 very difficult to implement as written, based on the number of people needed to make this run smoothly, and based on the type of expertise needed. And Maturity Level 4 may not prove all that beneficial (using cost-benefit analyses) to these organizations anyway.