The Process Areas of CMMI Model

The full CMMI model contains 22 Process Areas, each containing a series of practices designed to accomplish one or more goals. As a general rule, each Process Area can be implemented on its own, independent of the others. Yet as you become familiar with the model, you'll find that many of the Process Areas in CMMI are related to each other, add strength to each other, and build upon each other.

You might find it helpful or handy to inter relate Process Areas by grouping them into functional categories. Using or even recognizing this grouping is not mandatory for model success, but you might find it's a useful way of organizing things in your head. The grouping is sorted like this: in the model, six Process Areas (PAs) deal with project management, six deal with engineering, five others deal with the support functions of project execution, and five deal with process management within the organization.

Here's how the PAs are organized by functional category.

Project Management:
• Project Planning
• Project Monitoring and Control
• Integrated Project Management
• Quantitative Project Management
• Risk Management
• Supplier Agreement Management

Engineering:
• Requirements Management
• Requirements Development
• Verification
• Validation
• Technical Solution
• Product Integration

Support:
• Process and Product Quality Assurance
• Configuration Management
• Measurement and Analysis
• Decision Analysis and Resolution
• Causal Analysis and Resolution

Process Management:
• Organizational Process Focus
• Organizational Process Definition
• Organizational Training
• Organizational Process Performance
• Organizational Innovation and Deployment

Each PA is supported by one or more specific goals, which can be reached using the recommended specific practices. To support the implementation of each PA, CMMI also uses generic goals. The generic goals help institutionalize the activities of a Process Area into a project. There are five generic goals, each with its own generic practices.

That's a lot of best-practice data. And if you were to look at the CMMI components as a single model, the way that ISO 9001 and Six Sigma are, you might reach the conclusion that there's more than enough there, maybe too much. But CMMI was designed with scalability in mind. In fact, you can implement CMMI within your organization one of three ways. In each way, you select only certain portions of the model to use: portions that best suit your own process improvement needs, portions that address your chief management concerns, portions that get you to your process goals. One way is called the Continuous Representation. Another is called the Staged Representation. The third way in my term is called the "any way you want" way.