CMMI Institute

2015 Annual Report

to Partners

Dear Valued Partner,

We are pleased to report that 2015 was another record year for CMMI appraisals!
With over 1,900 SCAMPI A appraisals completed in 2015, we continue to see double digit
growth over the previous years and previous records!
Much of the growth in appraisals last year happened in the United States, China, and Latin
America. Thank you for your efforts to extend awareness and adoption of CMMI!
The goals of CMMI Institute are deeply connected to the goals of our Partners. We understand
that our shared success requires a common vision and direction. The recent changes to our
pricing structure and addition of the Partner Commission Program serve to better align our
interests with those of our Partners.
As you help your customers to achieve their goals, we seek to provide you with what you need
to succeed as a CMMI Institute Partner. In the 2015 survey, you told us that you need more
support for your CMMI business through marketing tools, Partner resources, improved
communication, and a focus on quality. These requests shaped our work over the last year,
and this report provides an overview of that work.
Partner collaboration was invaluable to our product development efforts this year. The Next
Generation working groups consist of more than one hundred people, and the Partner network
has supported efforts to collect market feedback from end users through surveys and pilot
testing. The evolution of CMMIs Next Generation depends on understanding market needs,
and by providing your experience and connecting us with your customers, you foster this
crucial understanding.
We have been thrilled to see 2015s appraisal growth accompanied by a growth in companies
talking about CMMI. Last year, many organizations chose to take additional steps to promote
their achievements with CMMI through presentations, case studies, and press releases.
Notably, Honeywells Chairman and CEO, Dave Cote, is quoted in a December 2015 press
release, saying:

"Our world-class software teams are developing better products, faster and at a
lower cost through improving standards, processes, and procedures. We view
compatibility with CMMI Maturity Level 5 as an important differentiator, providing
us with a competitive advantage that will help us achieve our long-term business
objectives."
Chairman Cote echoes what you have known for yearsthat CMMI helps organizations to
discover the powerful set of capabilities needed to reach their goals. We sincerely thank you
for your Partnership in this work.
Please participate in the Annual Partner Survey so that your feedback can inform this years
efforts to better support you as you work with your customers to develop capability and
deliver results with CMMI.
WITH VERY BEST REGARDS,

Dan Torrens
COO, CMMI Institute

Another Record Year for CMMI Appraisals in 2015

NUMBER OF APPRAISALS

CMMI Institute Partners led over 1,900 appraisals in 61 countries in 2015, making it the
fourth consecutive year for a record number of appraisals. The rate of growth has
increased year over year, reaching 17% more appraisals in 2015 than in 2014.

1913

1377

20

09

1353

20

10

1353

20

11

1439

20

12

1544

20

13

1634

20

14

20

15

APPRAISAL GROWTH OVERALL (BY YEAR)

Appraisal Growth Globally

The 17% overall growth in appraisals in 2015
resulted from growth in several countries.
Notably, the U.S. showed 28% growth in
appraisals after several flat years. Mexicos 27%
growth leads the Latin American increase that
extends to many parts of the region. Appraisals in
China continue to grow, with 22% more in 2015.

28%
UNITED
STATES

27%
MEXICO

22%
CHINA

17%
OVERALL
GROWTH

APPRAISAL GROWTH BY COUNTRY IN 2015

CMMI Institute Business Transitions

We understand that our success requires that we work together toward a common
vision with shared interests. In 2015, we made adjustments to the way that we do
business together and these changes will impact our Partnership in 2016 and beyond.
Partner input directly influenced us as we approached these decisions, and we are
grateful to those of you who contributed to the conversation.
PRICING CHANGE

U.S. PARTNERS

INTERNATIONAL

SUPPORT FEES

PARTNERS
SUPPORT FEES

Per Appraisal Fees

When CMMI Institute was founded in 2012, the organization inherited a pricing structure with two major
challenges. First, Partner organizations that sponsor
certified individuals based outside of the United
States paid higher support fees for those individuals
than their U.S.-based counterparts. While this
disparity made sense when CMMI was funded in part
by U.S. Federal monies, that funding is no longer in
place. Second, the structure of the pricing model
allowed CMMI Institute to grow only through the
addition of more certified individuals. Under this
system, growth in adoption and appraisalsthe
overall goal for CMMIrequired additional resources
without adding revenue to support those needs.

Now, thanks to the lowering of all support fees to the same rates and the addition of the per appraisal
fees, we can all succeed when demand for CMMI appraisals increases, as it has been for the last several
years. And while CMMI Institute will continue to welcome new Partners and certified individuals to the
community, we are no longer dependent on that mechanism alone to drive our growth. We will continue to
focus on growing market demand and expanding the pool of certified individuals to meet that demand.

COMMISSION PROGRAM
Partners directly support CMMI adopters in their journey to capability
and maturity, and CMMI Institute provides additional resources, training
courses, and certifications to strengthen those efforts inside organizations. We know that the end users who purchase these products
are usually already clients of a CMMI Partner. The Partner Commission
Program was designed to enable you to better serve your customers
by promoting value-adding products for their growth, while participating in the economic upside of those sales.
The Partner Commission Program allows our Partnership to work in both
directions. When you use CMMI Institute licensed products and services
to earn revenue from your clients, you pay a portion of that to CMMI
Institute as per seat fees and per appraisal fees. And when CMMI Institute earns revenue on sales of training, certifications, and online tools
from your customers, we will pay a portion of those sales back to you.

To Learn More Visit:

http://partners.clearmodel.com/
partner-commission-program
Watch a 30-minute video and
complete the enrollment form for
the Partner Commission Program.
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CMMI Partner Support

We are committed to providing our Partners with the resources, support, and service
that you need in order to fulfill your customers needs on the front lines of CMMI. We
appreciate the feedback we get from you to guide our improvement efforts. Based on
last years survey, we focused our efforts in 2015 on the following areas:
COMMUNICATION: Making sure our Partners know what we are doing and can give
us feedback.
MARKETING: Growing awareness of the value of CMMI, PCMM, and DMM among new and
existing users and markets.
PARTNER RESOURCES: Providing the tools necessary to deliver CMMI Institute licensed
services with excellence.
QUALITY: Supporting and ensuring the quality of Partner delivery of CMMI Institute
licensed services.

COMMUNICATION
In 2015, CMMI Institute and our Partners engaged in
a lot of conversation! In addition to our regular
patterns of monthly communication which allow
us to speak to our Partners, we pursued several
strategies to hear from our Partners in return. We
are committed to asking the Partners for input on
the decisions that will impact your business.
Our annual Partner Survey was followed by additional surveys throughout the year about the pricing
change, proposed features of Next Generation, and
Partner engagement through the commission program and marketing plans. We also asked for your
recommendations for improving the CMMI Institute
website and the SCAMPI Appraisal System. The
CMMI Partner Network LinkedIn group provides a
place for anyone in the network to post
announcements and begin conversations.
We continue to offer webinars for our Partners with
updates about CMMI Institute efforts. This year
we presented two webinars about Next Generation
progress, another focused on Instructors, and, most
recently, we hosted a webinar to introduce the
Partner Commission Program. All of the webinar recordings are available through the Partner
Resource Center (PRC) for on-demand viewing.

Not Sure Who To Contact

At CMMI Institute? Please Send
Your General Inquiries To:
Partner@CMMIinstitute.com
When you use this email address, your requests are funneled into our priority queue,
which allows the Partner Support team to
answer directly or quickly connect you with
the correct channel for your request. Hopefully, our communications about this have
been helpful to you, and you have noticed a
quicker turn-around on your inquiries. This
streamlined process has allowed us to better
serve you as we adopt CMMI for Services
practices for continuous improvement.

Some of you have asked for more frequent updates about the Next Generation Project, so we added a
project-specific Information Portal to the PRC that is updated regularly.
At the Partner Workshop in Seattle in May, we took online interaction into the real world by getting real-time
polling feedback from the Partners in attendance about specific ideas in the Next Generation project.
The 2016 Partner Workshop will be 12-13 May in Annapolis, Maryland. There is no cost to attend the Partner
Workshop, but registration is required and available now. More details will come to all Partners in February.
Beyond the Seattle Partner Workshop, we enjoyed the privilege of meeting in person with Partners several
times in 2015, with meetings in Asia, Europe, and the United States. We hope to expand our program of visiting
you and your clients in the coming year. Thank you to all who welcomed us in 2015!

MARKETING

Follow us on LinkedIn & Twitter

CMMI Institutes marketing team creates and distributes

content with a focus on the business value that results
from adoption of CMMI and DMM practices. At the Partner
Workshop in May, they provided a number of physical and
digital resources for Partners which are also available in the
PRC. The Partner Marketing Kit includes an updated CMMI
benefits presentation, graphic files (logos, wall charts, and
reference cards), and the CMMI Institute Partner Brand
Guidelines. When you align your Partner branding with our
guidelines, you help us to communicate one consistent
message about CMMI Institute to the world.

Several pages of the CMMI Institute website have been redesigned. The Who Uses CMMI? page is a great place
to point your prospective clients for recent quotes from executives about the value of their CMMI adoption.
We have worked with Partners to connect with end user organizations to create new case studies. Please
encour-age your clients to tell their CMMI success stories through a case study.
The Capability Insights and Information page houses a collection of downloadable infographics and
articles that you can include in communications with your customers. CMMI Institute features these
resources as well as relevant third-party resources through our social media campaigns on Twitter and
Linkedin. When you share these resources with your social networks, you simultaneously provide value to
them while demon-strating your credibility as a CMMI Partner.
Not all of our marketing efforts are digital, however. CMMI Institute hosted events in Shenzhen, London, and
Seattle through the CMMI Institute Global Conference Series. Additionally, Kirk Botula presented or sent video
messages to events in China, Portugal, Egypt, Germany, Thailand, and Colombia, and will keynote at events in
Mexico, Colombia, and the United States in 2016. We are very happy to support regional events to expand
awareness of CMMI with materials, promotional efforts, and keynote speakers. If you are connected to an event
that would benefit from CMMI Institutes
presence in 2016, please let us know!
Of course, we are looking forward to our own
upcoming conference, Capability Counts 2016 in
Annapolis, Maryland, 10-11 May 2016. We are
preparing for the conference this year with the
Capability Challenge webinar series and
competition.
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Sixteen organizations were selected to present

their story of building capability with CMMI or
DMM on a live webinar as part of the four month
Capability Challenge series. During each webinar,
attendees vote on the best story presented. The
winners will go on to compete in the final round of
the challenge at the Capability Counts conference
in Annapolis, where one will be crowned the
winner of the Capability Challenge!
The webinars have been well attended by practitioners from around the globe, and provide a
great introduction to the power of CMMI adoption.
If you have missed any of the webinars, you can
watch them online and share them with your
customers and prospects. These stories allow us to
strengthen our claims about the value of CMMI by
sharing third-party testimonials from the people
who have lived the value of CMMI. Please plan to
join us for the conference and the final round of
the competition in Annapolis in May!

PARTNER RESOURCES
Partnership with CMMI Institute gives your organization the opportunity to sponsor Lead
Appraisers, Instructors, and Enterprise Data
Management Experts. Once certified, you deliver
CMMI Institute licensed services to your customers
around the world and we are committed to helping
all 500 credentialed individuals
to do that work with excellence.
We updated materials, policies,
and resources this year to help
you to improve the delivery of
those services, and continue
to look for ways that we can
support your work and enable
excellence in delivery of all CMMI
Institute licensed services.
The new Partner Commission
Program allows Partners to
expand your portfolio of product
offerings to include advanced
CMMI Institute trainings and
certification exams to help your
customers build their internal
capabilities to grow and sustain
their results along their journey
with CMMI.

When instructors connect the CMMI Associate

exam to your introductory courses, you can add
a ribbon to the posting on the course calendar to
demonstrate a certification opportunity. You can
also pre-purchase Associate exam vouchers in bulk
to allow you to include the cost of the exam in
your Intro courses.
We redesigned the end of course evaluations for
all CMMI courses from paper to an online form. The
online form provides better data quality as well as
reports for each instructor across courses. We can
now analyze the aggregate data to identify opportunities for improving the courses overall and share
that data with instructors.
We responded to complaints about having two
separate upgrade training courses, and replaced
them both with the Fundamentals of CMMI
eLearning course.
We created a policy to allow Lead Appraisers to
submit their Appraisal Disclosure Statement twice
to provide leverage for collecting payment from
your customers. The Appraisal Team Member
Training Course Materials were updated to reflect
the CMMI Institute branding for consistency
across trainings.

Check The Partner Resource Center For

The Most Up-To-Date Materials
In 2015, CMMI Institutes training department updated
course materials for both versions of Introduction to CMMI
for Development, Introduction to CMMI for Services,
Acquisition Supplement, Development Supplement,
Services Supplement, and Introduction to the People CMM.
Be sure to download the most recent version before
your next course offering.

QUALITY
Quality is a major part of the CMMI brand promise,
and we are very serious about quality standards in the
work that our Partners do. Our quality team works in
the dual role of coach and referee, providing feedback
to help partners to improve in their efforts, while also
holding Partners accountable when quality and ethical
issues put the integrity of CMMI at risk.
As a coach, the quality team provides regular quality
tips. When an issue comes up multiple times, the team
discusses the mitigation and publishes instructions
to clarify the correct procedure. These tips are all
available online at http://partners.clearmodel.com/
cmmi-quality/scampi-quality-corner/

Quality is our promise

to CMMI users and the buyers

that hire themit is vital that
our Partners always act with
integrity and quality.

While these tips focus on SCAMPI appraisals, the quality team also supports quality efforts among
Instructors, including the shift to the online end of course evaluation forms.
In the middle of 2015, we updated our Code of Professional Conduct and all Partners, certified individuals,
and employees have signed off on the new code. Appraisal sponsors must also sign the Code of Professional Conduct, and this has been outlined, along with their other roles and responsibilities, in the
Appraisal Sponsor Role and Responsibilities document that is provided to all appraisal sponsors during
the appraisal process. We hope this will help you work with your clients and their efforts to support the
appraisal.
The quality team also investigates all ethics and compliance complaints that come in and conducts audits
of appraisals when necessary. Quality is our promise to CMMI users and the buyers that hire themit is
vital that our Partners always act with integrity and quality. If CMMI quality were to be compromised, our
entire business is compromised. Thank you for your commitment to quality and to our work together.

Product Development
The evolution of the CMMI product suite
is central to the work of CMMI Institute.
The work to move the CMMI forward has
included crucial help from our Partners as
developers, reviewers, pilot testers, and
connectors to end users who provide
market feedback. Thank you for your
part in the development of the future of
CMMI through new and improved
product and service offerings.

NEXT GENERATION
The CMMI Next Generation Project is well underway, with the following key goals driving the
development process:

Ensure CMMI adoption results in

material and measurable performance
gains or mitigations of risk
Make CMMI easy to adopt and use
In 2014, we convened the core team to develop
requirements based on a market research and
competitive analysis process. From these
requirements, several working groups formed to
begin developing solutions to meet the market
needs. Each of the groups invited volunteers from
the Partner network to join the efforts as
developers and reviewers. Over 100 individuals
volunteered to be part of a working group or
groups.
At the 2015 Partner Workshop in Seattle each
working group presented prototype solutions to
the Partner community for feedback. During the
Partner workshop, attendees had the opportunity
to give real-time feedback to the working group
leads through polling, small group discussions,
and one-on-one conversations. This provided the
first set of market validation data necessary for
the project.
After the Partner Workshop, the core team
re-convened to share the lessons learned and
refine the possible solution set based on Partner
feedback. As a next critical step, the core team
looked to understand the needs of CMMI end
users. By using a brochure outlining the proposed
Next Generation offering, we invited feedback
from the CMMI end users and collected their
responses through an online survey.

After collecting the market feedback, which was

very positive, the working groups created
solutions for pilot testing. These pilots are
happening in the first quarter of 2016, and the
working groups will use the outcomes of the pilot
tests to determine the next steps in the
development process.

DATA MANAGEMENT MATURITY MODEL

After the initial model release in 2014, the Data
Management Maturity (DMM)SM suite expanded in
2015 to include a set of training courses that serve
as a pathway to the Enterprise Data Management
Expert (EDME) certification.

DMM TRAINING COURSES:

Building Data Management Capabilities
ELearning Course
Advancing Data Management Capabilities Instructor-led Course
Enterprise Data Management Expert
Instructor-led Course
Currently, several certified EDMEs are working to
provide DMM assessments to organizations that
are serious about developing Data Management
Maturity. If your organization is interested in adding
DMM services to your portfolio, we recommend that
you download the free DMM resources, including an
e-book and several white papers and case studies
at the CMMI Institute website. The DMM model is
available for digital download for $100 and is also
part of the Partner Commission Program.

Partners helped us to reach their customers with the

survey, and we collected nearly 1,000 responses to
the survey about the proposed solution set. In
addition to the survey data, core team members
met with individual organizations that use CMMI, but
are not connected with the project, to test the
proposed solutions.

Thank you, Partners, for joining us in our mission to make the world work better.
We are committed to making the work that we do together work better, too, and
that can only happen when we hear directly from you and from your customers.
We look forward to another great year together in 2016!

PLEASE CONNECT WITH US AND WITH ONE ANOTHER:

RESPOND TO
THE ANNUAL
PARTNER SURVEY

ATTEND THE PARTNER

WORKSHOP IN
ANNAPOLIS, MD ON
12-13 MAY 2016

CHECK OUT THE

CAPABILITY CHALLENGE
AT CAPABILITY COUNTS
10-11 MAY 2016

GET INVOLVED WITH

THE NEXT GENERATION
PROJECT

INVITE US TO AN EVENT
IN YOUR REGION

JOIN THE
CONVERSATION ON THE
PARTNER NETWORK
LINKEDIN GROUP

HELP US BUILD A CASE

STUDY WITH A CLIENT

ENROLL IN THE
PARTNER COMMISSION
PROGRAM

CONTACT US ANYTIME
AT PARTNER@CMMI
INSTITUTE.COM

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