10.4. Making a CMMI Model Your Own (Tailoring)

If an organization were interested in using a CMMI model for process improvement, and at the same time was not interested in obtaining official ratings from an appraisal, it would have considerable leeway in focusing the appraisal on some parts of the model and not on others. The extent of the model scope, along with the number of disciplines covered and the number of projects to be investigated, all impact the resources required for an appraisal. To include more process areas means a greater effort and to include fewer process areas means a lesser effort.

Whether you have selected a continuous representation or a staged representation, if you are not going to produce ratings you may wish to tailor out some pieces of the model. For example, you may feel that the Supplier Agreement Management process area, which is staged at ML 2, could be ignored because agreements with suppliers are not a critical or problematic part of your business. In this case, you could identify the entire process area as out of scope. In other cases you might identify a part of a process area, such as a specific goal and its associated specific practices, as “not applicable.”