CMMI prerequisites

General Advice:
I'm sure the reason you don't have any answers yet is because the consultants who know these answers a more professional than to give blind advice. All of the answers depend on what you do and how you do it. I won't give answers for that reason but I will try to help.

Start at the beginning. You need to be clear about your motivation for this to work. If you want to improve the way you work and use CMMI as a guide, fine. If you see CMMI as "a good thing" you will have trouble. ?CMMI distilled? by Ahern & Clouse & Turner published by Addison-Wesley may help.

It is not a badge senior management can tell you to get without their continued and active involvement in the details of the work the organisation does. It will also require the commitment of all to follow the agreed ways of working. You'll need to commit to training people for their roles: no more "in at the deep end" assignments without mentoring or training.

CMMI is not a bolt on. The practices must become part of your work culture. It is a process of continuous improvement. It may require a culture change for everyone in your organisation.

You will need an appropriately trained (e.g. SEI) external consultant to do assessments for you. Use them in the early months to assess how far you are from your goal.

To reach a level, you have to have all the practices in the level below and 80 percent of the level you are aiming for. An assessment can look at any worker and any project, so a small group who haven?t bought in can sink your ambitions. Getting your people to meet this challenge is key.

Incidentally, if you are aiming for level 2, don?t just look at level 2 or you?ll institute limited practices without an idea of where you are going. That then becomes hard to overcome when you move up to level 3, 4 and 5. CMMI using the areas of practice as a whole may help avoid that.

Q1 CMM/SW or CMMI?
Depends on what you do. CMMI is intended for the cross discipline teams and concurrent engineering (more than SW). CMMI is also seen as far more complex because it is more far reaching. CMMI may also replace CMM/SW in the longerterm. CMM has levels to attain. CMMI can also use levels or concentrate areas of practice which may be more useful for some.

Q2 & Q3 Staffing and qualifications
Everyone will need to be involved in some way to make it work. Having an ?expert?in a corner will only get ?shelfware? ? level zero ? the documents (process assets) you produce will need to be used by all. This takes more effort than anything else. You will need one senior manager to make sure the change of approach happens. You will need a process improvement person for the day to day helping of projects and maintain the process assets. Help to publish the process assets in a form everyone can use. You will need experts in the practice areas to advice and guide management and process improvement. You will need people to do internal assessments (often called audits). These can be part-timers but don?t use junior staff on their own ? they won?t have enough experience understanding to make judgements. Trainee programmers are unlike to know if the project plan is reasonable in context with the business requirements and the risks involved. (Is an activity omitted because it makes sense to omit or through laziness/poor practice?)
You will need external assessmentto get your CMM level. This can be resource hungry.. SEI (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/) administers CMM and CMMI. You?ll find training and qualification information there. Your senior people may need that level of training so they can understand where they are leading people. Internal people can be trained by your consultants or be experts in what they do.

Q4 & 5 depend on you - get an initial assessment from an expert.

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