What is an Appraisal?

An appraisal is an activity that helps you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your organization’s processes and to examine how closely the processes relate to CMMI best practices.

Many organizations find value in measuring their capability and performance by conducting an appraisal to identify and prioritize their business improvement eﬀorts and eventually earning a benchmark maturity level or a capability level achievement.

Appraisals are typically conducted to:

Determine how well the organization’s processes compare to CMMI best practices, and identify areas where improvement can be made.
Inform external customers and suppliers about how well the organization's processes compare to CMMI best practices.
Meet customer contractual requirements.

Benefits of an Appraisal

Appraisal activities can help organizations at any stage of their CMMI adoption and are proven to enable more rapid and eﬀective improvement eﬀorts. The CMMI Appraisal Method is designed to support your CMMI journey as a proven best practice to ensure the most eﬃcient and eﬀective improvement results. They provide reliable, clear, consistent, and actionable focus on performance improvements that will have the most impact on the business and help build and improve capability.

An appraisal enables your organization to:

Plan for an improvement strategy for your organization to prioritize the most important business performance improvement.
Mitigate risks for product and service acquisition, development, delivery, and monitoring.
Demonstrate to customers and business partners the soundness of your processes by having your appraisal results available on the Published Appraisal Results (PARS) site.
Determine the CMMI levels that represent how well your organization’s processes conform to the CMMI.

Helpful Resources

Interested in learning more about successfully adopting or transitioning to CMMI? ISACA's CMMI adoption guide helps all CMMI advocates with tips and advice on adopting the CMMI for improved business performance. For more information on how current companies are implementing the CMMI, visit the Resource Center to ﬁnd all of our Case Studies.

To purchase a copy of the CMMI Method Definition Document (MDD) click here.