James R. Persse - Process Improvement Essentials: CMMI, Six Sigma, and ISO 9001

Copyright 2008 O'Reilly Media, Inc.

THIS BOOK IS NOT INTENDED AS A COMPREHENSIVE LOOK AT THE ART AND TECHNIQUE OF PROCESS improvement, nor is it intended to give you a complete look at ISO 9001:2000, CMMI, or Six Sigma. Those types of books are already out there. The weighty thing about them is that they are comprehensive, filled with good information, depth, and a lot of material. Sometimes they contain more than what you might be looking for initially.

Because I work in the field of process improvement, it is not uncommon for people to come up to me at trade shows or after seminars or at organizational meetings and ask my opinion about one of these three well-known programs.

They want an answer that's less than comprehensive. (In fact, they often want an answer that's less than useful.) Two or three sentences to the query: Which program should we adopt? Or, what's the difference between these three? Or, what would it cost to get certified? Those are questions none of us can answer in a three-minute conversation. But I've tried to come close to that in this slim volume.

The chief purpose of this book is to help people who are new to process improvement get a basic understanding of the purpose, aim, and structure of this growing field and to help them understand how ISO 9000, CMMI, and Six Sigma relate to the industry and to one another. It's also designed to help set beginners on the way to making an informed decision, should they wish to move into deeper exploration along more specific lines.

In of this book, I'll begin by taking a general look at the intent of process improvement. Today's technologies industries are becoming more and more quality-conscious, especially as IT budgets grow and represent bigger and bigger expenditures within corporations. Waste, inefficiencies, and compromised quality can have a dramatic impact on a company's competitive position and its success in the marketplace. So technology managers are more and more attuned to the business nature of their missions. And they realize that there are very real business advantages to process management.

Next, in , the sections that describe each component of the quality program.

After I look at ISO, I'll look at the Capability Maturity Model from the Software Engineering Institute, a foundation based out of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. (The latest release of this program is actually named CMMI-Dev, Version 1.2, with the "I" standing for Integration and the "Dev" standing for Developmentan integrated model intended for development organizations.) CMMI integrates quality recommendations for systems engineering, software engineering, and integrated product and process development. You'll notice that's a more constrained focus than ISO 9001:2000. ISO is shaped for any manufacturing enterprise. CMMI is specially designed for technology companies, especially those that deal in some form or fashion with the design and development of software. CMMI is structured differently from ISO. It's shaped as a collection of Process Areas, each with a series of goals and practices designed to help you reach those goals. I'll look at each Process Area in CMMI and then look at ways an organization can implement the Process Areas to reach its own quality goals.

I'll also take a look at Six Sigma. Six Sigma is a quality program that's been used to great extent and with great success at companies such as Honeywell, Motorola, and (most famously) General Electric. Six Sigma is a way to measure quality by measuring a company's ability to meet the needs of its customers through process refinement and process improvement. It's highly customer focused and highly data-centric. One of its core philosophies is that decisions should not be made on gut instinct alone. Instead, decisions should be made based on hard data, and that data should be collected from sources that support the needs of the customers. Unlike ISO and CMMI, Six Sigma is not published or regulated by a central body. It is a free-floating program, but as its user community increases, more and more support for its application is coming into the market. I'll look at the intention and philosophy of Six Sigma and then delve into its methodology, DMAIC. Then I'll look at some basic statistical tools that can help support a Six Sigma program.