People CMM

Do you need to improve your management of people to get full advantage from your software development capability?

Can you attract, train, deploy, and retain the people you need to develop software in today's competitive market?

With the help of the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI), many organizations have made improvements in their software and systems processes and practices. They have also discovered that their continued improvement requires significant changes in the way they manage people.

The People CMM is a maturity framework that describes the key elements of managing and developing the workforce of an organization. It describes an evolutionary improvement path from an ad hoc approach to managing the work-force, to a mature, disciplined development of the knowledge, skills, and motivation of the people that fuels enhanced business performance.

Although the formal period for submitting comments about the next version of the People CMM is over, the SEI People CMM Team appreciates change requests and insights shared by members of the community. We welcome your ideas about ways to update the model to reflect the best of current thinking and methods in workforce practice improvements.

The People CMM helps organizations to

• characterize the maturity of their human resource practices
• set priorities for improving the competence of its work-force
• integrate competence growth with process improvement
• establish a culture of workforce excellence

The People CMM publications and training will support incorporating people management capabilities into software improvement programs by communicating a model that complements the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI), and by making available an appraisal method that can be used alone or integrated with existing process appraisal methods.

The People CMM is designed to guide organizations in selecting activities for improving their workforce practices based on the current maturity of their workforce practices. By concentrating on a focused set of practices and working aggressively to install them, organizations can steadily improve their level of talent and make continuous and lasting gains in their performance. The People CMM guides an organization through a series of increasingly sophisticated practices and techniques for developing its overall work-force. These practices have been chosen from experience as those that have significant impact on individual, team, and organizational performance.

The People Capability Maturity Model (People CMM) adapts the maturity framework of the Capability Maturity Model for Software (CMM) [Paulk 95], to managing and developing an organization's work force. The motivation for the People CMM is to radically improve the ability of software organizations to attract, develop, motivate, organize, and retain the talent needed to continuously improve software development capability. The People CMM is designed to allow software organizations to integrate work-force improvement with software process improvement programs guided by the SW-CMM. The People CMM can also be used by any kind of organization as a guide for improving their people-related and work-force practices.

Based on the best current practices in the fields such as human resources and organizational development, the People CMM provides organizations with guidance on how to gain control of their processes for managing and developing their work force. The People CMM helps organizations to characterize the maturity of their work-force practices, guide a program of continuous work-force development, set priorities for immediate actions, integrate work-force development with process improvement, and establish a culture of software engineering excellence. It describes an evolutionary improvement path from ad hoc, inconsistently performed practices, to a mature, disciplined development of the knowledge, skills, and motivation of the work force, just as the CMM describes an evolutionary improvement path for the software processes within an organization.

The People CMM consists of five maturity levels that lay successive foundations for continuously improving talent, developing effective teams, and successfully managing the people assets of the organization. Each maturity level is a well-defined evolutionary plateau that institutionalizes a level of capability for developing the talent within the organization.

Except for Level 1, each maturity level is decomposed into several key process areas that indicate the areas an organization should focus on to improve its workforce capability. Each key process area is described in terms of the key practices that contribute to satisfying its goals. The key practices describe the infrastructure and activities that contribute most to the effective implementation and institutionalization of the key process area.

The five maturity levels of the People CMM are:

1) Initial.

2) Repeatable. The key process areas at Level 2 focus on instilling basic discipline into workforce activities. They are:

• Work Environment
• Communications
• Staffing
• Performance Management
• Training
• Compensation

3) Defined. The key process areas at Level 3 address issues surrounding the identification of the organization's primary competencies and aligning its people management activities with them. They are:

• Knowledge and Skills Analysis
• Workforce Planning
• Competency Development
• Career Development
• Competency-Based Practices
• Participatory Culture

4) Managed. The key process areas at Level 4 focus on quantitatively managing organizational growth in people management capabilities and in establishing competency-based teams. They are:

• Mentoring
• Team Building
• Team-Based Practices
• Organizational Competency Management
• Organizational
• Performance Alignment

5) Optimizing. The key process areas at Level 5 cover the issues that address continuous improvement of methods for developing competency, at both the organizational and the individual level. They are:

• Personal Competency Development
• Coaching
• Continuous Workforce Innovation