Conna,
Yes, some government contracts require the application of the SEI CMM(tm)
and even limit bidders to those that have been assessed a Level 3 (having
spent $100,000 or so to get assessed).
But let's be clear that CMM has no connection to Quality and it may be a
disservice to your students. let alone to quality professionals, to indicate
such.
I would be interested in how ISO9000 "dumbed down" a CMM Level 3
organization. If you have the time, what, specifically, did ISO9000
suppress? I am not aware of anything in ISO 9000 that says what cannot be
done in a company (except not have a process and not keep verification
records).
I suggest that this subject is important to management and leadership
because the CMM and especially its successor, CMMI, puts far more importance
on conforming (to a set of heuristics selected by the method of acclamation)
than on thinking.
> Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2002 10:36:55 -0400
> From: Conna Condon [mailto:
gandolf@cyberverse.com]
>
> Thanks, Jack
>
> I appreciate and will follow up on the Phil Crosby and Crosby Quality
> College information.
>
> SEI and CMM are standards which are included in contractual requirements
> for maintaining quality in some major corporations that I am aware of.
> They are included in some government work. So, whether they have ever
> or will ever be empirically proven matters not one dot to an Executive's
> requirement to comply with them and to understand the advantages and
> disadvantages of them.
>
> That being said, I just finished a consulting project with a major
> corporation that has used SEI CMM for its applications development
> group, but they accepted a contract which required ISO9000. So, the
> poor applications types all had to take their work done to SEI standards
> and reformat to ISO9000 compliance (per the way this corporation chose
> to do ISO9000). For them this meant downgrading the quality of their
> SEI since they had achieved level 3 and ISO required less.
>
> I realize that is anecdotal. However, having worked with both
> standards, I'd follow SEI CMM as the more stringent model ... as a
> practitioner vs. a researcher.
>
> Conna Condon
> DBA Candidate
> Process Consultant
>