As you might have guessed from my recent post about CMM, my organisation is currently looking at CMM and whether/why/how we should be adopting it to improve the maturity of our software development processes.

Hand in hand with that someone has recently asked how CMM fits into our BPM strategy.

I need to take an aside here to say that we don’t actually have a BPM strategy, but we need one. We have an increasing number of BPM adopters throughout the organisation and our lack of clear strategy or governance exposes the risk of letting down all interested parties by letting them do their own thing without any clear guidance.

But back to CMM and its place in BPM...

Business Process Management is an approach to management that improves the effectiveness of an organisation. The graph at the top of this page shows ‘the world of BPM’ - BPM encapsulates the three types of activity that are a part of process management. The axes on the graph can be pretty much anything you like - cost, time, effort, risk, potential return, ...

Process re-engineering is large-scale change to an organisation’s business processes - Essentially throwing out what you’ve got now because it’s completely ineffective and starting over again. Very high risk, very high effort and very expensive.

Process renewal is the usual domain of BPM - Looking at how you work now and changing components of the existing processes to improve their efficiency, effectiveness or agility.

Process improvement is the lowest level (i.e. simplest) process change. Essentially this involves ‘tweaking’ processes so that they perform better and more efficiently, and does not involve making large changes to a process (although there may be large changes to the way the process is executed). Perhaps the most common methodologies for undertaking process improvement are Lean and Six Sigma, but this is also where CMM(I) fits in.

CMM is a methodology for software process improvement, providing guidance on assessing where your software processes are and what you need to do to improve on your current position.

So, CMM fits nicely within BPM - albeit in a specific part (incremental process improvement, targetted only at software processes) - but is also a standalone methodology, so does not require an organisational BPM strategy to be successful.

There is a second, unasked question, about where CMM ranks in comparison to the increasingly-common, and incredibly powerful, combination of Lean and Six Sigma.

Since Lean Six Sigma is something I’m still increasing my knowledge of that is a discussion for another day. My impression so far is that changes should be governed by the analysis that Six Sigma provides, but that CMM provides a great methodology for identifying the specific improvements that can be implemented to resolve performance problems identified by Six Sigma.