As CMMI Consultants, if you come across the situation wherein you have to differentiate between CMMI Maturity Level 2 Service Delivery Process Area and CMMI Maturity Level 3 Service System Development Process Area, how will you do this? Essentially, as CMMI Consultants, do we essentially know the fundamental difference between CMMI Service Delivery Process Area and CMMI Service System Development Process Area? Or, as CMMI Consultants, we are facing the problem of justifying the existence of CMMI Service Delivery Process Area at Level 2 and CMMI Service System Development Process Areas at Level 3.

CMMI FAQ 0

25th March, 2015

As CMMI Consultants, if you come across the situation wherein you have to differentiate between CMMI Maturity Level 2 Service Delivery Process Area and CMMI Maturity Level 3 Service System Development Process Area, how will you do this? Essentially, as CMMI Consultants, do we essentially know the fundamental difference between CMMI Service Delivery Process Area and CMMI Service System Development Process Area? Or, as CMMI Consultants, we are facing the problem of justifying the existence of CMMI Service Delivery Process Area at Level 2 and CMMI Service System Development Process Areas at Level 3.

In words of CMMI, Service Delivery (SD) is a Service Establishment and Delivery Process Area at Maturity Level 2 and is meant to deliver services in accordance with service agreements. Whereas, Service System Development (SSD) is also a Service Establishment and Delivery Process Area at Maturity Level 3 and is meant to analyze, design, develop, integrate, verify, and validate service systems, including service system components, to satisfy existing or anticipated service agreements.

Difference between SD and SSD

At the basic level there is a difference in scope between both of these Process Areas. SD works at the Project Level while SSD could be used at Org Level to develop new service systems and maintain ongoing service systems.

Activities performed under the Service Delivery (SD) process area involve establishing and maintaining service agreements, preparing and maintaining a service delivery approach, preparing for service delivery, delivering services, receiving and processing service requests and maintaining service systems. Service Delivery covers establishing and maintaining written agreements. We can say that SD process area establishes a relationship between service provider, customer and end users by fulfilling requirements of all three. Service Delivery process area also includes service of operating, monitoring and maintaining the service system along-with service delivery.

On the other hand Service System Development (SSD) focuses on the development of New Service Systems and Maintaining Ongoing Service. Activities performed in SSD involve collecting, coordinating, analyzing, validating, and allocating stakeholder requirements for service systems, Evaluating and selecting from alternative service system solutions, Designing and building or composing (as needed), Integrating, and documenting service systems that meet requirements, Verifying and validating service systems to confirm they satisfy their intended requirements and they will satisfy customer and end-user expectations during actual service delivery.

Service system development is driven by service and service system requirements collected from service agreements, defects and problems, incidents and their resolutions and preventions.

Source: CMMI-SVC Model, CMMI Institute. Interpretation by the author

Other Reference What is Service System Development (SSD) in context of CMMI for Services?