CMMI provides industry best practices to support an organization's improvement work in four primary categories:
- Process Management: practices for handling the overall improvement cycle – identifying needs, performing diagnosis, planning the improvements, and managing the deployment of improvement.
- Project Management: best practices for planning and managing projects.
- Engineering: technical best practices for performing the software or systems work in projects
- Support: support functions (such as quality assurance and measurement) that are used by other process areas
An organization can approach a CMMI-based improvement program in a number of ways, including
- Focus in a particular process category
- Work on a subset of the process areas from one or more categories, gradually building their capability in those target areas.
- Structure its improvement using the maturity levels of CMMI, addressing first the process areas that help the organization function successfully within projects, then across the organization.
When selecting an approach that is best suited for an organization, a first decision is to choose a representation of CMMI, either staged or continuous.
