In the life of each organization, different key points represent their competitive advantage, at different times. Adherence to CMMI is one of them.

What is CMMI?

• an aid for organizational and project process improvement
• an organized collection of best practice attribute
• a way for the organization to have predictable and measurable quality results

Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) CMMI is an internationally recognized measure of an organization's methodology maturity. TechTeam Akela has received CMMI Software Engineering Maturity Level 3 rating under the latest version (1.2) in December 2006. CMMI is the most trusted certification in the software industry. For more information, please visit the CMMI official website at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/general/ .

As a process model CMMI deals with: 

• project processes
• organizational processes
• organizational support to projects

CMMI goals:

• reduce risks
• improve predictability
• increase product quality

TechTeam Akela and CMMI

Benefits:

• an internal proprietary methodology compliant with CMMI-DEV v1.2 Maturity Level 3 requirements
• an evolving collection of lessons learned and best practices
• product quality increased in time as well as the in-place processes' efficiency

Road map:

• early 2005: several of our key team members were trained in the CMMI courses
• late 2005: external gap assessment - the goal of the CMMI initiative was to improve our existing procedures (from ISO standard) to CMMI compliant processes. As our ISO procedures were well established and complete, we have decided to target level 3 of CMMI.
• February and July - 2 external SCAMPIs (C and B)
• December 2006 - CMMI-DEV STAGED v1.2 resulted after the SCAMPI A
  TechTeam Akela become the first Romanian company to hold a CMMI-DEV certification and it is among the first companies in Europe to receive the CMMI certification under the new version of the standard - v1.2, released in August 2006
• present - continuous improvement of our internal methodologies and results

Source: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/adoption/pdf/cmmi-overview07.pdf

Richard Basque, president and founder of Alcyonix (http://www.alcyonix.com) was the SEI-Authorized Lead Appraiser (ref. 0000087-00) who conducted the SCAMPI appraisal in December 2006, commented: "Achieving the CMMI Maturity Level 3 represents a significant milestone. The people at Akela are young but the maturity of their working approach is high. Me and my team members were impressed with the internalization of the "process way" by Akela's people. By sharing lessons learned and historical data across projects, Akela proves to be a true learning organization".