CMMI Updates Take Performance Improvements to the Next Level

Ron Lear
Author: Ron Lear, Vice President, Frameworks and Models, CMMI Content Development & Services
Date Published: 10 April 2023

The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) has grown and evolved quite a bit in its 32-year history. Tracing CMMI’s roots back to the Software CMM first released in 1991, CMMI set the bar for process improvement and is synonymous with what the term “maturity level” now means across a broad set of industries, domains, frameworks and geographies.

With the release of CMMI Performance Solutions, previously known as CMMI V2.0 in 2018, there was a fundamental shift from traditional process improvement compliance to outcomes-based continuous performance improvement with consistent and independently verified achievement of better quality, improved cost and schedule performance, higher productivity, less risk, and better business results for those organizations that have adopted CMMI.

Excitingly, the evolution continues. Over the past two years, based on clear and consistent feedback from customers—including those buying products and services from CMMI end-user organizations, the end-user organizations themselves, and CMMI Partners—the ISACA content development team has worked closely with members of the community to create the next iteration of the CMMI model. With the rapidly increasing pace of technology, business, information growth and changing world events, CMMI has had to evolve more rapidly than ever. As such, I am happy to highlight the release of CMMI V3.0—a culmination and assembly of community collaboration with engagement, feedback and dialogues to make CMMI even more relevant.

Based on clear customer demand, CMMI V3.0 now broadens organizational performance improvement beyond the historical product development, service operations, and supplier management, to now include security, safety, data management, people management, and managing virtual workforce best practices across these eight domains—all integrated into a single, yet highly customizable model of best practices. Whether your organization wants to build a new capability or improve and mature an existing one, CMMI V3.0 provides the best practices for doing so across a broad spectrum of industries, disciplines and domains to continue to help organizations improve their performance effectively and efficiently.

On this 32-year anniversary in 2023, we will also be releasing the 2019-2022 CMMI Technical Report–Performance Results from ISACA. This technical report describes and highlights the consistently impressive results of performance improvement organizations that have adopted CMMI, as recorded in the CMMI Performance Report and independently validated by certified CMMI Lead Appraisers and Appraisal Teams. Of note, given the 8,866 appraised and a total of 33,272 performance objectives that CMMI appraisal teams have reviewed, 84.4% of those objectives have been successfully achieved or surpassed by the organizations that have successfully adopted CMMI.

CMMI Performance Solutions, and the V3.0 Model and related updates, continue to demonstrate consistent, continuous performance for quality, cost and schedule management, and productivity improvements in nearly any organization or industry, worldwide.

Please take a look at the new content in CMMI 3.0, and the results shown in the soon-to-be released CMMI Technical Report-Performance Results, and let us know what you think. As you will see, CMMI continues to deliver on its promises of better cost and schedule performance, higher quality and lower risk for the organizations adopting it.