What is the relationship of CMMI Process Models with ISO Certification Standards…

CMMI FAQ 0

12th June, 2015

CMMI Process model and ISO Certification standards have different origins. CMMI Process Models have been developed in the past by an organization called Software Engineering Institute (SEI) which is US Department of Defence funded organization and a part of the illustrious Carnegie Mellon University based at Pittsburgh, USA. ISO Certification Standards are published by International Organization for Standardization and is based at Geneva. The various countries of the world are represented at ISO by their respective National Standards Body.

Coming to the relationship between CMMI Process Models and ISO Certification Standards – both being structured collection of best practices – have reasonable overlap in terms of subject matter content. For e.g., the most common ISO 9001:2008 Quality Management System Certification Standard finds resonance with the CMMI Process Models like CMMI-DEV (CMMI for Development), CMMI-SVC (CMMI for Services) and CMMI-ACQ (CMMI for Acquisition). ISO 27001:2013, the ISO Certification Standard for Information Security Management Systems has commonality with the Document published by the Software Engineering Institute called Security by Design with CMMI for Development. On similar lines, the ITIL framework based ISO 20000-1 Certification Standard for IT Service Management has the overlap with CMMI-SVC (CMMI for Services).

The crux of the matter is when an organization is going in for implementation and certification of multiple standards it should consider adopting an integrated approach for implementation and certification.