This document/website is intended to provide the CMMI adoption community with documentation on the set of resources used to conduct a successful CMMI implementation pilot with two small companies in Huntsville, Alabama.  The authors hope that access to the toolkit, in conjunction with the complementary Experience Reports (one for each company) that will be published as Technical Notes in 1st quarter 2005, will help to motivate small companies to begin adoption of CMMI in ways that will improve their business.  We often hear that CMMI "wasn't built for small companies so it won't work in them", or some variant of this sentiment.  Although it is true that CMMI was not explicitly built for small companies, nor was it explicitly built for large ones.  Our experience as related in these reports is that CMMI, when applied in a way that responds to the business realities of a small business, can provide them with great utility.

To further the goal of motivating adoption of CMMI by small companies, we provide examples of both the tools that we used and some of the results that we achieved, so that other small companies will have greater confidence in their interpretation of CMMI constructs and contents.

Another purpose of this toolkit, although not a primary one, is to provide writers of other interpretive guides for CMMI with an example of a "live" guide that contains directly reusable assets rather than just a report documenting results. We hope users of the live guide will provide us with feedback on how well this experiment worked.