What is Process Improvement

Capability maturity models (CMM), an out growth of the decades old quality movement, and originally developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute for the US Defense Department in the 1980s as a way to improve software engineering, has become the inspiration for similar models addressing every aspect of public management by governments around the world. CMM posits several evolutionary stages that organizations must pass through to achieve increasingly higher levels of capability in achieving quality. Stages are determined by research evidence, expert opinion, best practices and evaluations. While CMM has produced some impressive gains, it has drawn criticism for lacking a theoretical underpinning, exorbitant costs, being somewhat subjective and lack of success in many organizations. The field has no universal agreed upon standards, so it may be necessary to create an organization to study and vet various CMM applications. The field as it matures presents an excellent opportunity to study public management in the context of organizations employing CMM.