Last week I did a mapping of the BABOK against the exposure draft of the upcoming revision of the PMBOK. For the most part, it was a reasonably straightforward process.
I’m currently working my way through CMMI for Development 1.2. This is not as simple. In most cases the mapping is pretty obvious but it has caused me to identify some minor gaps that will have to be filled. There’s also a lot of it to map. I’m currently working through the 8th out of 23 areas.
I think I’m going to be really glad I did this. For one thing, I get asked by a lot of people how they can justify investing in business analysis to their employers. The IIBA doesn’t have the funding or resources to do a lot of original research in this area in the near future, but this mapping means that we can leverage a lot of the research that’s already being done for CMMI, and that organizations looking to improve their business analysis practices have a proven and well-understood model for doing so.
The mapping also, frankly, demonstrates that business analysis skills are pretty critical to implementing CMMI–that is, if you want to improve your development processes, there’s a lot BAs can do to help in that regard. A great many, probably a majority, of CMMI practices are things that skilled BAs can do or assist with.
The other big thing it’s done for me is to confirm that the changes we made to the Solution Assessment and Validation KA were good ones. The new structure works matches up against CMMI quite well–in fact, a surprising amount of the higher maturity levels tie into that KA. The old KA structure, on the other hand, simply couldn’t have been adapted easily to process improvement (even IT process improvement).
These mapping documents will not be included in v2 itself but will be available from the IIBA. I’ll probably put the drafts up sometime in the not too distant future for people to see.
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