CMMI - L 4 - Quantitatively Managed - OPP and QPM

Organizational Process Performance (OPP)

The purpose of this PA is to establish and maintain a quantitative understanding of the performance of the organization’s set of processes. It also provides process performance data, baselines and models to quantitatively manage the projects.

Goal - Establish Performance Baselines and Models

Quantitative Project Management (QPM)

The purpose of this PA is to quantitatively manage the project’s defined process to achieve the project’s quality goals and process performance objectives. It involves:

- Establishing goals
- Identifying suitable sub processes for control based on historic stability (Statistical Process Control – SPC)
- Monitoring to see whether goals are being met
- Finding out reasons for variation (from SPC charts) and taking suitable measures to reduce them in future

The key aspect at Level 4 is to Understand special causes of variation. Reducing variation of parameters is the objective. The parameters can be process or product measures.

Ex:
DIR, CoQ, Review effectiveness (all process measures);
Schedule deviation, Delivered defects(quality), Code quality (all product measures).

Goals:

1. Quantitatmanage a projectively
2. Statistically manage sub process performance (Ex of statistical methods are: SPC, Pareto, Cause Effect diagrams, etc.

QPM gives us direction to measure and manage project performance in terms of measurable data. Having a good QPM structure helps the organization in having better control, better management information and improved estimation and tracking.

When a project starts, it defines the metrics it will collect (defects, effort etc) and goals. It also defined sub processes that will be statistically controlled. These are defined in the PM Plan. These goals are monitored on a continuous basis through milestone reports and SPC charts.

Next - CMMI - Level 5 - Optimizing

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