Summary

The purpose of Organizational Process Focus (OPF) (CMMI-ACQ) is to plan, implement, and deploy organizational process improvements based on a thorough understanding of current strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s processes and process assets.

Description

The organization’s processes include all processes used by the organization and its projects. Candidate improvements to the organization’s processes and process assets are obtained from various sources, including the measurement of processes, lessons learned in implementing processes, results of process appraisals, results of product and service evaluation activities, results of customer satisfaction evaluations, results of benchmarking against other organizations’ processes, and recommendations from other improvement initiatives in the organization.

Process improvement occurs in the context of the organization’s needs and is used to address the organization’s objectives. The organization encourages participation in process improvement activities by those who perform the process. The responsibility for facilitating and managing the organization’s process improvement activities, including coordinating the participation of others, is typically assigned to a process group. The organization provides the long-term commitment and resources required to sponsor this group and to ensure the effective and timely deployment of improvements.

The acquirer encourages supplier participation in process improvement activities.

Careful planning is required to ensure that process improvement efforts across the organization are adequately managed and implemented. Results of the organization’s process improvement planning are documented in a process improvement plan.

The “organization’s process improvement plan” addresses appraisal planning, process action planning, pilot planning, and deployment planning. Appraisal plans describe the appraisal timeline and schedule, the scope of the appraisal, resources required to perform the appraisal, the reference model against which the appraisal will be performed, and logistics for the appraisal.

Process action plans usually result from appraisals and document how improvements targeting weaknesses uncovered by an appraisal will be implemented. Sometimes the improvement described in the process action plan should be tested on a small group before deploying it across the organization. In these cases, a pilot plan is generated.

When the improvement is to be deployed, a deployment plan is created. This plan describes when and how the improvement will be deployed across the organization.

Organizational process assets are used to describe, implement, and improve the organization’s processes. (See the definition of “organizational process assets” in the glossary.)

References

Refer to the Organizational Process Definition (OPD) (CMMI-ACQ) process area for more information about establishing organizational process assets.

Contains

OPF.SG 1 Determine Process Improvement Opportunities
Strengths, weaknesses, and improvement opportunities for the organization’s processes are identified periodically and as…
OPF.SG 2 Plan and Implement Process Actions
Process actions that address improvements to the organization’s processes and process assets are planned and implemented…
OPF.SG 3 Deploy Organizational Process Assets and Incorporate Experiences
Organizational process assets are deployed across the organization and process related experiences are incorporated into…