5 critical steps for adopting CMM in an ISO environment

The ISO 9000 series of standards first appeared in 1987. The Capability Maturity Model for software (SW-CMM) was under development by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at that time and was soon to go into widespread use. In the years between their inception and the present these two sets of quality instructions have outlasted all their competitors and become defacto standards of quality. The software industry, as a result, often has to address both the ISO series of standards, specifically ISO 9001, as well as the CMM. This occurrence is despite the fact that only the CMMO was specifically developed for software. When organizations are pursuing both ISO 9000 certification and CMM certification they often find substantive overlap and economies of scale as they adhere to both sets of requirements. In some organizations strategic implementation strategies are able to effectively merge the two sets of requirements so that distinctions between the two are largely unnoticed. This has lead to incorrect assumptions that moving between ISO 9000 and the CMM is relatively straightforward. This paper examines a case where an ISO 9000 certified European organization is required to attain CMMO certification. One of the challenges in this effort is recognizing that some of the differences between the ISO 9000 series of standards and the CMM are, in fact, major and that only concentrated efforts to overcome these differences result in success.