The story behind mimacom and CMMI starts in 2008 when the company started to steadily shift its processes towards the CMMI standard. Why would a Swiss based enterprise adopt a US standard, mostly known in Asia? The answer lies in the company's culture and vision. Continuous improvement and the desire to find a new daily challenge, are core values of the company engrained into every employee.

In addition, mimacom focuses on international development and business strategies. An international company needs to adopt international standards. The decision to go for a CMMI certification just seemed like the logical next step.  Back then, CMMI Level 5 seemed as a very ambitious, not to say naive, goal.

Things seemed very challenging in the beginning: Can CMMI be implemented alongside our agile methods? Is CMMI compatible with our standardized product mimacom path?

Both questions can now be answered with a “yes”. It makes mimacom especially proud to be the first and only company so far, to have reached Maturity Level 5 with agile methods!

Although standards like CMMI mainly have an impact on the internal processes of a company, it still has some direct benefits for mimacom's customers:

• They can be sure that well-defined, established and standardized processes are developed by our software.
• By worrying less about the process itself, it allows all involved parties to focus even more so on the concrete issues of the project and wishes of the customer.
• Predictability during a project has been vastly improved. It is possible to make quantitative statements based on measurable key performance indicators, e.g. team speed and from there, onto trends of the efforts necessary.
• The well-proven, best practices of mimacom can be ensured in each project, from each team, down to each team member, e.g. stable quality standards.
  
  

In CMMI terms, a company can't actually be certified but appraised. This is done following a process called Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement (SCAMPI). The preparations for the appraisal are very extensive and involve the whole company. At mimacom it boiled down to an intensive week in June 2012, when appraisers from every corner of the world came to visit mimacom in Berne. The composition of the team reflects the international orientation: a professor at Kasetsart University Bangkok, Thailand; a noted consulting company from Thailand; a team leader from South Africa and a consultant from Poland.

We’d like to briefly introduce the most important member of our appraisal team:

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) currently includes three reference models, which address processes areas in software development, software acquisition and software services.

CMMI was originally developed by experts at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh PA, mainly sponsored through the Department of Defense, in 1986. Currently the SEI is the owner of CMMI and is responsible for the further development, as well as the certification processes (www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi).

As a classic “what”- model CMMI defines goals and practices, divided into catergories and process areas. These goals and practices must be covered by specific processes of the company. With the degree coverage the process areas and the organization as a whole are then rated and classified in five maturity levels.

With the highest maturity levels being four and five, CMMI requires improvements based on collected data for process key performance indicators (KPI’s) and statistical as well as quantitative methods.

Currently, there are about 4,000 companies certified officially, most of them (2,700) on the Maturity Level 3.

In Switzerland, there are 7 companies certified by CMMI standards. mimacom being  the only Switzerland based company certified on maturity level 5.

• Official webpage of the SEI about CMMI
• Official publication of mimacom’s appraisal results