What typical questions CMMI Consultants ask the Customer for providing the Proposal for CMMI Consulting and Appraisal Assignments? What are the questions that customer has to face when requesting for a CMMI Proposal from CMMI Consultants?

CMMI FAQ 0

5th July, 2014

All organizational representatives must have faced this situation that when their management asks them to get a proposal for CMMI Assessment (or CMMI Certification, as most managements like to call it) on a very urgent basis. When the organizational representatives get in touch with the CMMI Consultants, they are faced with a volley of questions that the CMMI Consultants start asking the customer. On one side, you as an organizational representative, have to give feedback to the Management regarding the cost and time-frames with respect to CMMI Appraisal / CMMI Certification, on the other side, the CMMI Consultants are not in a position to provide you with this information unless you provide some basic information to them. In this case, it better to be prepared with the responses to the questions that the CMMI Consultants may ask you. For your benefit, I have recorded some typical questions that CMMI Consultants ask the organizational representatives when a proposal is requested from the CMMI Consultants for CMMI Assessment (CMMI Certification):

1. Name of the organization and its Location                             

• Size of the organization
• Overall Staff Strength
• Annual turnover (optional)

2. Line of Business

• IT org or non-IT org.?
• If non-IT, then is it the IT department or the entire organization that is aiming for the assessment
• Nature of business – typical products and services
• Application Domains of products and services
• Key quality requirements and characteristics for the products and services

3. Organization Level Information

• Attach the organization chart showing position of projects, support functions and management reporting channels
• Number of development centers/units, no. of people in each development center/unit
• No. of support functions, people in support functions
• Quality set-up in the organization,
• Organization for Quality – one point contact, group for driving Software Process Improvement Average number of projects executed at any point of time
• Demographics of project types (% age staff in each project type)
• Review/Governance mechanisms
• Principal Customers of the organization
• Is the organization engaged in outsourcing/sub contracting?
• Is there a common repository for project related information and capturing organizational assets? If yes, please provide details
• Is there a repository for collecting and analyzing metrics?

4. Project Level Information

• Typical Deliverables
• Typical Hardware and Software Platforms in use
• Average Duration and staff-strength in projects
• Average years of experience of the people in projects
• Different roles identified in a project and reporting relationships of the roles – Attach a chart of a typical Project Organization
• Common tools used in projects (e.g. for Project management, version control, code generation etc.)
• Typical standards and guidelines used in projects
• Types of Trainings typically conducted in projects
• Typical Quality Assurance activities in projects
• Governance mechanism for compliance checking in the project and its frequency
• Types of project artifacts (apart from deliverables)
• Typical metrics collected – Please specify project type along with applicable metrics
• Project Name (s)
• Team Size
• Project Domain
• Type of Project
• Project Start Date
• Project End Date
• Scope of Work of Projects
• Current Phase of the project
• Total Estimated Effort
• Work Environment for Development/ Implementation/Execution

5. Software Process Improvement Related:

• Is there buying-in from client’s top management for this initiative?
• Who is the sponsor for the initiative – seniority in the organization
• Who are the Client Contacts, Designation and the level?
• Rationale for choosing the CMMI model and the level (What is the business problem that is addressed by this)
• Any external agency involved in helping / mentoring the organization with SPI
• Status/Progress vis a vis the initiative (in terms of start time and current state)
• Past history of SPI; past certifications
• Time frames desired for the assessment/appraisal

6. Scope of the Engagement

(Duration of the appraisal to be decided based on the size and scope of the engagement.)

• Only SCAMPI A (Final) assessment that will be filed with CMMI Institute (if yes, has any readiness review been done before? What are the results?)
  Or
• Gap analysis for readiness review followed by assessment.

7. Expectations from Lead appraiser for the assignment in terms of

1. Determining appraisal scope and the model scope
2. Determining the timelines and duration for the appraisal exercise keeping the pre-onsite and on-site activities in mind
3. Trainings to be given
4. Planning and scheduling
5. Selection of ATMs
6. Projects/Support Groups/Functions to be sampled for appraisal
7. Assisting the clients in understanding PIIs and populating PIIs with objective evidence details
8. Enabling Doc. review by ATMs using PIIs
9. Conducting the appraisal and filing results with CMMI Institute