All team members are required to take initial notes on questionnaire responses, document reviews, formal presentations, and interviews.
Before and during consolidation, all notes are reviewed and incorporated into a manageable summary of information first by each team member and then by mini-teams and the team as a whole.
Assessment team members review their notes immediately following interview sessions, annotate them, highlight significant information, and cross-reference them with the primary KPA/PAs to which each note applies. Even at this early stage, members should continuously try to discern what "strengths" are relevant to satisfying KPA/PA goals and what "weaknesses" are serious enough to probe further. Retaining mountains of "strength" and "weakness" statements will only prolong and confuse the consolidation process.
Ultimately, the team’s summaries produce a set of "observations" (see Section 10.3), which are specifically keyed to practices within a KPA/PA. Observations are usually generated by mini-team members and are eventually combined into one set for each KPA/PA plus a catch-all set of non-modelrelated observations. For all KPAs/PAs within the scope of the assessment, the team will create observations for all practices of the KPA/PA. Observations draw attention to an organization’s practice’s strength (S) or weakness (W), or they record the provision of an acceptable alternative (A) to the practices defined by a CMM/CMMI KPA/PA goal. Observations must be annotated to identify the session(s) in which the data was gathered, to clarify whether the observation pertains to strengths or weaknesses, and to specify related CMM/CMMI practices.