PITTSBURGH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As we enter 2015 amidst the growing impact of change management, the development of necessary capabilities to meet the dynamic and unpredictable needs of the business remains a top priority for seven out of 10 senior executives, according to a report by McKinsey & Company. Organizations must understand where they stand today in order to accomplish their goals in the future. To facilitate this understanding, CMMI® Institute, which offers global benchmarks in best practices for improving business performance, today released the “Top 8 Capabilities to Strengthen your Business in 2015,” a list of the top capability areas that make up a proven framework for organizations to quickly understand how well their business is doing in the capabilities that matter most to them:
Top 8 Capabilities to Strengthen Your Business in 2015
1. Product Engineering and Development: Reliably understand and agree on customer needs and then design and build the solutions that meet those needs.
2. Service Delivery and Management: Control costs while defining and reliably delivering services that satisfy your customers.
3. Supplier Management: Select and manage suppliers effectively to ensure that you get what you need from them.
4. People Management: Develop skills, build teams, manage performance, and shape your workforce to meet key business goals.
5. Data Management: Govern your data, improve data quality, and monitor key indicators to ensure that your data practice suits your enterprise needs.
6. Project and Work Management: Plan and monitor your work while managing risks to meet customer needs and business goals.
7. Process Management: Define and improve the processes that will support business objectives, and train staff to perform their roles using those processes.
8. Supporting Infrastructure: Make effective decisions, manage quality, and measure what matters most to your business.
To complement the “Top 8 Capabilities to Strengthen your Business in 2015” list, CMMI Institute also unveiled the “Assess Your Organization’s Capability” tool, an online self-assessment tool which extends access to Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). This new tool enables businesses of all sizes to begin their journey of elevating performance by diagnosing the current state of their organization. By answering a brief set of questions online, business leaders will gain critical insights into their organization’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as recommended solutions to improve the capability of their organization. The tool delivers an assessment report aligned to CMMI Institute’s eight capability areas, as well as a set of next steps that organizations can take to improve its capabilities.
“Capabilities are the key success factors that enable your organization to accomplish its mission and goals. Building capability allows you to move beyond heroic effort and isolated success to repeatable performance and continuous improvement,” said Kirk Botula, CEO of CMMI Institute. “Not all organizations need to build all capabilities, but every organization needs to understand and develop the capabilities that matter most in their field. CMMI Institute’s eight capability areas and new self-assessment tool will enable business leaders to get a comprehensive picture of their performance as they begin planning for improvements in 2015.”
How Capable is Your Organization?
Business leaders can now identify their key capabilities by conducting an online capability self-assessment—a health check designed to determine what the company needs to do in order to build or strengthen the skills and systems designed to lift the enterprise, business unit, or specific function to the next level. CMMI Institute is offering the self-assessment tool in both free and paid options:
- Free Assess Your Organization’s Capability Tool – Allows you to track your organization’s capability across eight key business functions. After answering 31 questions users are provided a high level snapshot of their organization’s current state of capability and suggestions for developing next steps.
- Paid Virtual CMMI Advisor – An in-depth health check of your current capability in several key areas, resulting in a robust gap analysis report that can be used to develop a plan for building the specific practices and processes that matter most to your business. The paid self-assessment tool covering Product Development capabilities or Service Delivery capabilities is available for $799. The tool that covers both sets of capabilities is available for $999.
About CMMI Institute
CMMI® helps organizations discover the true value they can deliver by building capability in their people and processes. CMMI Institute, a subsidiary of Carnegie Mellon University, provides the CMMI models, training and consulting services and appraisal methods developed through collaboration of industry, government, and academia. To learn more about how the CMMI Institute and its Partner Network can help your organization build and benchmark your capabilities, visit cmmiinstitute.com.