Almost a decade back, a craze started within IT companies to get themselves certified at CMM levels (the Capability Maturity Model) created by Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. This craze was more predominant with Indian IT companies to the extent that more than half of the world's CMM Level 5 companies are based in India. Though I don’t need to define CMM as it has got internalized within every software professional but it makes sense to see how the CMM tutorials defines it. CMM describes an evolutionary improvement path from an adhoc, immature process to a mature, disciplined process. The CMM covers practices for planning, engineering, and managing software development and maintenance. At the Optimizing Level or the CMM level5, the focus is on continuous process improvement.
Let me now summarize some of the survey results on success / failure ratio of IT projects. These have been taken from various surveys originated by the likes of KPMG, Robbins, Gioia, Center for Project Management, and many others.
- 51% of ERP implementations have been classified as unsuccessful
- 40% of the projects failed to achieve their business case within 1 year of going live
- Nearly half of the UK's largest companies suffered a failed IT project over the past three years
- Nearly half of respondents reported at least one project failure in the past year
- 77% of projects blow their budgets, with an average cost overrun of 169%
Basically there is no dearth on statistics on the net for failed projects along with their names and even vendors involved
After so many years of this certification process being heavily adopted by almost all major IT companies, we are still seeing a similar statistics on IT failures which was prevalent earlier. Most of these cos are certified at the highest level possible and have even gone ahead on trying out 6 sigma, CMMI, ISO, and many others. Shouldn’t there be a positive correlation with no of companies getting certified and success ratios of IT projects? Why haven’t we started seeing quality of code improving? At least have the internal processes improved? I am sure I don’t need to answer these based on my above statistics.
So are these certifications worth their hype or are they pure marketing gimmick? It might have started as a differentiator for these companies, but has now become just a qualifier. The SEI model was founded by the US ministry of Defense and was funded very (let me put this in BOLD) heavily and hence has received sufficient publicity. I don’t want to get into a criticism of this model as it has its own advantages. But I believe this has become just a requirement mandated by major outsourcers in selecting a vendor. This is more of a compliance factor in which to sustain in the ever competitive world, the vendors are trying hard to get themselves recognized and keep trying new models and certifications. But the spirit and the inherent purpose of creating such certifications are getting lost. And unless we look at the basic fundamentals on which these were created, they will lose its worth. In fact some of the niche and agile companies borne in today's scenario might start opting out of them.
