3 CMMI and Systems Engineering

In late 1999 the systems engineering community will be presented with a new process maturity model produced by the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) project. The immediate significance to systems engineers is that the new model offers, for the first time, strong integration and consistency with the Software CMM (SW-CMM v2). Organizations can choose to use one or more of several highly integrated models – a Systems Engineering CMM, a Software CMM and a Systems + Software CMM. Organizations can further choose to use a continuous or a staged version of each model and be assured of equivalent content. This paper describes the relationship of the new CMMI models to the recently completed EIA/IS 731, Systems Engineering Capability Model, and the potential impacts to systems engineering process appraisal and improvement. An overview of the CMMI models and terminology is provided as a basis for describing the relation to the EIA/IS 731