The 3 types of process

We are all (all too) familiar with the ISO standards, CMMI levels and so on. All of these prescribe excellent processes and the benefits of which we are all realizing. At the same time, there are projects and organization that feel that some of the processes are not optimal for them. Maybe its an overhead? True - there is a discipline called Tailoring, but it is also one of the least understood processes from CMMI..after QPM that is!

Many organizations struggle to implement CMMI. After spending thousands of dollars in planning, assessment (and celebrating L5 with a party and gifts), within a few months, they are back to where they started. The biggest reason for this is the "ALL for ALL" approach. All processes for all projects. How do we change this and what can be a model to achieve this?

There are only 2 primary purpose to processes. One is Risk mitigation and Second is Improvements. We will call risk mitigation processes as "Safety" and one that gives improvements as "Premium". To make the decision making simple for us, we will add a third category - "Foundation". The purpose of this grouping is described below:

How does this categorization help implementation and tailoring? Will this be useful to realize full value of processes? We will see in next blog.