CMMI and the People CMM can form a powerful partnership in positioning your processes and your people to achieve aggressive business goals.

The People CMM improves the capability of your workforce, which in turn improves your ability to improve your processes. CMMI models help you improve the capability of your processes. The end result of all these improvements is much improved performance.

Either improving your workforce capability or process capability alone will improve performance, but combining them increases the positive result.

People CMM and CMMI combine workforce capability and process capability. The People CMM defines capability as the levels of knowledge, skills, and process abilities available within each workforce competency of the organization to build its products or deliver its services.

CMMI contains practices that contribute directly to the business performance of an organization. CMMI-ACQ improves the capability to manage suppliers. CMM-DEV improves the capability to develop and maintain products and services. CMMI-SVC improves the capability to establish, deliver, and manage services. All of these practices involve the workforce. A capable workforce can implement these improvements more effectively and efficiently. Therefore, the People CMM accelerates CMMI-based improvement programs.

The connection between the People CMM and CMMI-SVC is especially strong since people are an integral part of services. Service organizations rely strongly on the capability of their workforce to deliver services, process incidents, and monitor customer satisfaction. You could say that services are people-centric.

Below are links to more information about the synergies that exist between the People CMM and CMMI:

The People CMM as a Contributor to Other Models and Frameworks, an SEI presentation, describes how the People CMM supports and accelerates the use of process improvement models, in particular the CMMI-SVC model.

ASAP: Applying Services (CMMI-SVC) and People CMM, a presentation by Agapi Svolou of Alexanna LLC and Palma Buttles of the SEI, describes how the use of People CMM and CMMI-SVC together can help develop competitive advantage in the services marketplace.

There are other methods, standards, and technologies that comprise CMMI Compatibility.