Business Goals
The first rule of an assessment is that an organization should make its real business objectives clear and understandable to everyone in the organization and to the assessment team.
Businesses look to assessments because they are experiencing difficulties with or have a desire to improve their levels of predictability, quality, scheduling, or costs, or because they want to distinguish themselves to the outside as having mature levels of predictability, quality, scheduling, or costs.
An assessment’s business goals (which will be enumerated in the assessment plan) have a direct bearing on system/software management, development, and maintenance activities, and include attempts to do the following:
- Reduce the cost of developing and maintaining software products.
- Improve the time to market of software products.
- Improve the quality and cost of software products.
- Improve the timeliness and reliability of software development services.
Organizational Scope
The most important communications between an organization executive and the Lead Assessor involve the assessment’s scope. That is, it must be decided what representative part of a company should constitute the "organization being assessed."
An assessment looks at capability of an entire division or company. However, this does not mean that it looks at all parts of the company, which in many cases would be much too large an undertaking. The idea is to examine the way company-wide institutions work within the scope of selected projects. An assessment measures how capable the whole organization has proven itself in its ability to anticipate problems and reduce the likelihood of a product having poor quality or being delivered past the promised date.
A few (usually 45) specific projects are selected that represent typical work being performed in the entire organization to be assessed. The projects selected depend on the company’s management structure, geographic locations, and product lines being developed. The capability of organization-wide institutions is investigated by looking at support functions that span not only these selected projects but also all other projects within the organization.
Eventually, a formal assessment plan will fully identify not only the representative projects to be examined by the assessment but also the rationale for establishing the scope and the risks associated with addressing it during the assessment process.
Reference Model Scope
Another major aspect of assessment scope has to do with the reference model scopethe part of the reference model to be investigated. The reference model scope relates to the potential maturity level of the organization and therefore identifies the process areas to be investigated. (As a matter of practical consideration, the higher the maturity level being assessed, the more effort and time the assessment will require.)
Often senior management believes that the organization is better than it is and sets an unrealistically high standard for the maturity levels to examine. When this happens, it creates a negative and stressful experience for all concerned, rather than a positive culture-evolving experience.