Research has shown that the most powerful initial step to process improvement is to build organizational support through strong senior management sponsorship. To gain the sponsorship of senior management, it is often beneficial to expose them to the performance results experienced by others who have used CMMI to improve their processes [Gibson 2006].

For more information about CMMI performance results, see the SEI website at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/research/results/.

The senior manager, once committed as the process improvement sponsor, must be actively involved in the CMMI-based process improvement effort. Activities performed by the senior management sponsor include but are not limited to the following:

· Influence the organization to adopt CMMI

· Choose the best people to manage the process improvement effort

· Monitor the process improvement effort personally

· Be a visible advocate and spokesperson for the process improvement effort

· Ensure that adequate resources are available to enable the process improvement effort to be successful

Given sufficient senior management sponsorship, the next step is establishing a strong, technically competent process group that represents relevant stakeholders to guide process improvement efforts [Ahern 2008, Dymond 2005].

For an organization with a mission to develop software-intensive systems, the process group might include those who represent different disciplines across the organization and other selected members based on the business needs driving improvement. For example, a systems administrator may focus on information technology support, whereas a marketing representative may focus on integrating customers’ needs. Both members could make powerful contributions to the process group.

Once your organization decides to adopt CMMI, planning can begin with an improvement approach such as the IDEAL^SM (Initiating, Diagnosing, Establishing, Acting, and Learning) model [McFeeley 1996]. For more information about the IDEAL model, see the SEI website at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/96hb001.cfm.