Improving Your Service Delivery with CMMI® for Services* – Quick Look

The CMMI-SVC model is a collection of practices for service providers. Examples of service organizations that can use CMMI-SVC are:

• Maintenance (of products, systems, facilities)
• Human resources
• Health care
• IT services
• Logistics

When and why to use CMMI-SVC?
The purpose of using any framework is to improve the performance of an organization. For a group that provides services, this can include: reducing the amount of errors in services provided, reducing the labor needed to provide each service, improving coordination and consistency of service delivery, reducing the risk of mistakes and surprises, and maintaining improvement gains made over time.

 

A summary of the CMMI-SVC model is provided below. The items marked “(svc)” in red are the major differences compared to the CMMI-Development model (CMMI-DEV).

 

The benefits from using CMMI Level 2 and 3 practices are to:

• Clarify customer service requirements early
• Scope, plan, estimate and negotiate service work to manage expectations and achieve commitments
• Track progress to know work status at any time
• Maintain defined quality standards throughout the organization and report strengths and problems to management
• Manage versions of documents, consumables and components so that time is not wasted using incorrect versions or recreating lost versions
• Manage and coordinate multiple teams that have cross dependencies
• Employ practices for capacity planning, incidence resolution, service creation and service continuity across the organization
• Look for new service opportunities and create services to satisfy those needs
• Collect lessons learned and team data to systematically improve future organizational performance

Summary of CMMI-SVC (Staged Representation)

CMMI® for Services, Version 1.3

The Maturity Level 2 Process Areas are summarized below.

Service Delivery: Deliver services in accordance with service agreements. Prepare, execute and improve.

Requirements Management: a) Define the services of the group, b) trace defined services to team activities, c) verify that resources, service definition and actual work done match.

Work Planning: Establish and maintain plans (major tasks, estimates, risks and resources) for service work.

Work Monitoring and Control: Understand the group’s progress so that appropriate corrective actions can be taken when performance deviates significantly from the plan.

Supplier Agreement Management: Manage the acquisition of products and services from suppliers. This Process Area can be declared Not Applicable (after discussion with the appraiser) if there are no custom, risky, or integrated suppliers.

Measurement and Analysis: Develop and sustain a measurement capability that is used to support management information needs.

Process and Product Quality Assurance: Provide staff and management with objective insight into processes and associated work products.

Configuration Management: Establish and maintain the integrity of work products using configuration identification (labelling), configuration control (known modifications and permission to modify), configuration status accounting (final status of work products), and configuration audits (checks to verify changes).

The service-specific Process Areas are summarized below.

Capacity and Availability Management: Ensure effective service system performance and ensure that resources are provided and used effectively to support service requirements.

Incident Resolution and Prevention: Ensure timely and effective resolution of service incidents and prevention of service incidents as appropriate.

Service System Transition: Deploy new or significantly changed service system components while managing their effect on ongoing service delivery.

Service Continuity: Establish and maintain plans to ensure continuity of services during and following any significant disruption of normal operations.

Service System Development: Analyze, design, develop, integrate, verify, and validate service systems, including service system components, to satisfy existing or anticipated service agreements. [This is an optional Process Area.]

Strategic Service Management: Establish and maintain standard services in concert with strategic needs and plans.

The remaining Level 3 Process Areas are summarized below.

Organizational Process Focus: Coordinate improvements. Take what is learned at the team level and organize and deploy this information across the organization. The result is that all teams improve faster from the positive and negative lessons of others.

Organizational Process Definition: Organize best practices and historical data into a useful and usable library.

Organizational Training: Assess, prioritize and deploy training across the organization, including domain-specific, technology and process skills needed to reduce errors and improve team efficiency.

Integrated Work Management: Perform work planning using company defined best practices and tailoring guidelines. Use organizational historical data for estimation. Identify dependencies and stakeholders for coordination, and comprehend this information into a master schedule or overall work plan.

As work progresses, coordinate all key stakeholders. Use thresholds to trigger corrective action (such as schedule and effort deviation metrics).

Risk Management: Assess and prioritize all types of risks in a project and develop mitigation actions for the highest priority ones. Start by considering a predefined list of common risks and use a method for setting priorities.

Decision Analysis and Resolution: Systematically select from alternative options using criteria, prioritization and an evaluation method.

* Information source = CMMI® for Services, Version 1.3

Condensed list of Level 2 + 3 practices: http://www.processgroup.com/condensed-cmmi1p3-svc-v1.pdf

Full model text: http://cmmiinstitute.com/resources/cmmi-services-version-13

 

® CMMI is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University.