Organizational Performance Management (OPM) (CMMI-SVC)

The Organizational Performance Management process area enables the organization to manage organizational performance by iteratively analyzing aggregated project or work data, identifying gaps in performance against the business objectives, and selecting and deploying improvements to close the gaps.

In this process area, the term “improvement” includes all incremental and innovative process and technology improvements, including those improvements made to work environments. “Improvement” refers to all ideas that would change the organization’s processes, technologies, and performance to better meet the organization’s business objectives and associated quality and process performance objectives.

Business objectives that this process area might address include the following:

• Improved product quality (e.g., functionality, quality attributes)
• Increased productivity
• Increased process efficiency and effectiveness
• Increased consistency in meeting budget and schedule
• Decreased cycle time
• Greater customer and end-user satisfaction
• Shorter development or production time to change functionality, add new features, or adapt to new technologies
• Improved performance of a supply chain involving multiple suppliers
• Improved use of resources across the organization

The organization analyzes product and process performance data from the work to determine if it is capable of meeting the quality and process performance objectives. Process performance baselines and process performance models, developed using Organizational Process Performance processes, are used as part of the analysis. Causal Analysis and Resolution processes can also be used to identify potential areas of improvement or specific improvement proposals.

The organization identifies and proactively solicits incremental and innovative improvements from within the organization and from external sources such as academia, competitive intelligence, and successful improvements implemented elsewhere.

Realization of the improvements and their effects on the quality and process performance objectives depends on being able to effectively identify, evaluate, implement, and deploy improvements to the organization’s processes and technologies.

Realization of the improvements and beneficial effects also depends on engaging the workforce in identifying and evaluating possible improvements and maintaining a focus on long-term planning that includes the identification of innovations.

Improvement proposals are evaluated and validated for their effectiveness in the target environment. Based on this evaluation, improvements are prioritized and selected for deployment to new and ongoing work. Deployment is managed in accordance with the deployment plan and performance data are analyzed using statistical and other quantitative techniques to determine the effects of the improvement on quality and process performance objectives.

This improvement cycle continually optimizes organizational processes based on quality and process performance objectives. Business objectives are periodically reviewed to ensure they are current and quality and process performance objectives are updated as appropriate.

The Organizational Process Focus process area includes no assumptions about the quantitative basis for identifying improvements, nor their expected results. This process area extends the Organizational Process Focus practices by focusing on process improvement based on a quantitative understanding of the organization’s set of standard processes and technologies and their expected quality and process performance.

The specific practices of this process area apply to organizations whose work is quantitatively managed. Use of the specific practices of this process area can add value in other situations, but the results may not provide the same degree of impact to the organization’s quality and process performance objectives.