Avantare is no stranger to innovative processes, improved efficiency and increased profitability. Since 2001, it has been their mission to utilize these values of quality, competitiveness, permanence and growth through models and standards like CMMI, ISO/IEC 29110, ITIL and others to serve customers around the world.
Since 2006, Avantare has been a CMMI Partner with ISACA; and in 2020, they reached Maturity Level 5 for three business units. ISACA’s CMMI maturity model has enabled them to help other organizations achieve measurable and sustainable business outcomes—and after assisting so many other organizations, Avantare decided to adopt CMMI’s applicable Services view for itself in 2014. In doing so, they have been able to provide customers with a real-life illustration of CMMI’s lasting benefits, demonstrate their commitment to CMMI best practices and dedicate themselves to consistently bettering their own business performance.
Several specific areas were identified for improvement, including improved response times for their Specialized Services unit, increasing pipeline and customer retention, and measuring and improving the overall quality of services provided to customers. With these areas in mind, Avantare was able to focus on capabilities like ensuring quality, delivering and managing services, sustaining habit and persistence, and others.
Avantare then established specific business goals—including to maintain the profitability of each business unit, to increase customer satisfaction ratings and to improve the perception of service quality—and outlined actionable and measurable next steps to achieve them. The improvement of the perception of service quality, for example, was reached “through the application of agile and innovative techniques in consulting services and professional training that are focused on generating a culture of tangible improvement through the implementation of KPIs in each service unit.” These goals and their consequent achievements enabled Avantare to become more organized, standardized and efficient, achieving additional clarity on their internal decision-making process.
The following is an excerpt from this case study:
"Avantare has always been committed to the quality of the services they provide and have had support form management from the start. As a smaller organization, they were concerned that applying CMMI Services might be a challenge, but those concerns were unfounded. And, as an organization dedicated to continuous improvement, they knew they needed to apply those same principles to themselves to grow and succeed. Particularly, identifying the key areas for improvement and the key performance metrics to measure that success helped convince their board to approve the investment in CMMI. Avantare also invested in an external certified CMMI Lead Appraiser to help keep them on track and focused. This helped them to uncover several ‘aha’ moments: seeing the power of applying an innovation using statistical data to determine the most critical variables to measure and seeing increased customer satisfaction in the quality of services provided.”
For more key outcomes and lessons learned from Avantare’s CMMI experiences, download the full case study for free here. Additional information about CMMI and related resources are available at https://www.isaca.org/enterprise/cmmi-performance-solutions.