During ISACA Conference North America 2022, ISACA launched a new initiative focusing on the pursuit of digital trust, which means that this topic was present in several discussions throughout the conference. Digital trust needs to be present in every level of an organization for it to be successful, so it is more important than ever for businesses to ensure they are operating efficiently and effectively.
During his conference presentation last month, Dr. Brian Gallagher, a CMMI High Maturity Lead Appraiser and ISACA CISA with BG Solutions and Services in Centerton, Arkansas, demonstrated how important a model like CMMI can be in understanding a business’s current levels of capability and optimizing its performance. Gallagher’s presentation, “Sustaining Habit and Persistence: Survey Results from Over 20 CMMI Appraisals,” focused on just that: creating and maintaining habit persistence through CMMI and emphasizing how important that creation and maintenance is through a survey analysis.
To sustain habits and persistence, an organization needs to have a clear vision, skills, incentives, resources, and an action plan; without any one of these elements, the business’s potential success becomes confusion, anxiety, frustration, or a false start. While other standards focus on doing the work, they do not explicitly address how to manage, enable, and improve work the way that the CMMI model does. CMMI enables success by making certain that an organization’s performance is not only achieved, but continuously improved and sustained.
Governance and Implementation Infrastructure
Ensuring an organization’s processes are habitual and persistent requires focus and effort, and CMMI explicitly addresses this through two practice areas: governance and implementation infrastructure.
According to Gallagher and ISACA’s CMMI model, governance minimizes the cost of process implementation, increases the likelihood of meeting objectives, and ensures that the implemented processes support and contribute to the success of the business. There are levels within CMMI that represent growing capability, from the basic capabilities in level one up to a possible level five. The highest possible rating for governance is a level four, which means that senior management ensures that selected decisions are driven by statistical and qualitative analysis related to performance and achievement of quality and process performance objectives.
Alongside governance, another method through which CMMI enables success is implementation infrastructure, which sustains the ability to consistently achieve goals efficiently and effectively. The highest rating for implementation infrastructure is a three, which means that organizational processes and process assets are used to plan, manage and perform the work; the adherence to and effectiveness of the organizational processes are evaluated; and process-related information or process assets are contributed to the organization.
Surveys and Analysis
In addition to utilizing benchmark and sustainment appraisals to evaluate habit and persistence, Gallagher notes that a survey instrument can provide further insights by allowing appraisal participants to reflect on the governance and implementation infrastructure practices outside of the structured interview process. Surveys allow anonymous inputs, provoke deeper thoughts on the practices, provide space for self-reflection, and highlight insights on areas that the organization might assess differently.
Gallagher reported survey results from 325 individual responses across 20 different organizations during both CMMI for Development and CMMI for Services appraisals. The average score was an 83.6 percent, and further analysis of these results highlights the areas that these companies struggled most with: establishing and using metrics effectively, assignment responsibility and holding people accountable, using processes to get the work done, providing adequate resources to perform the work, and evaluating adherence to and effectiveness of processes. At the same time, these companies already had a good handle on aligning competencies with organizational objectives, using organizational processes and process assets to perform the work, and contributing process experiences back to the organization.
With these results in mind, Gallagher recommended using survey instruments to augment habit and persistence insights, as well as to gauge process habit and persistence outside of a formal appraisal event. He encouraged companies to act on the common issues presented in these findings and to share their experiences. By doing so, these organizations would set themselves on the right track to consistently meet their goals, optimize their performances for success, and create habit persistence that would ensure their organization stands out from others in their industry with CMMI.