Adherence

Adherence to the Standards, or Compliance

The Standard: Defining the Compliance Baseline

The Standard is simply your company's official way of working. It's the Organizational Process Framework that guides how you deliver services.

What You Must Follow

The primary standards you must follow are your high-level Policies and the detailed Procedures (or SOPs).

Adherence means your people and your projects are executing work exactly as documented in these mandatory standards. If you don't follow them, that's called a deviation or finding—and it must be recorded.

Supporting Documents & Mandatory Use

Besides the main procedures, you have Supporting Documents like Forms, Checklists, Templates, and Work Instructions.

Choice is Flexible: You often have the flexibility to choose which templates or forms to use for a specific project.
Adherence is Not: The key is this: Once your project chooses to use a specific template or form, it becomes mandatory for that project. You must adhere to it.

Tailoring and Approval

You can also tailor the process. This means a project can decide to use a simpler template, or even skip a template entirely if it doesn't apply to the work.

However, this tailoring is not a free-for-all. Any change must be formally approved by a designated authority (like a Quality Manager). This approval ensures that your project's chosen process still meets the company's essential measurement and reporting requirements. You can change the how, but you can't break the rules.

Adherence

What is Adherence?

In simple words, Adherence means working in conformance with your documented procedures and policies. It is the assurance that everyone is following the agreed-upon plan for delivering your service.

How Do We Get People to Comply?

Good Question! Compliance isn't accidental—it must be institutionalized. You need to use a deliberate strategy:

Leadership Mandates: The executive team must clearly state that following the process is mandatory.
Demonstrate Value: Show practitioners why the process makes their job easier, reduces errors, and leads to predictable results.
Incentivize: Use training, positive reinforcement, and effective methods to ensure people comply.
Visibility: It is essential that everyone understands they need to comply, and that deviations won't go unnoticed.

How Do We Know People Are Complying?

You need an objective set of eyes!

You must set up a Process Compliance Evaluation Group. Call it whatever you want—Quality Assurance (QA) is the typical title—but this group must act as an independent fact-finder.

Their Job: Their primary role is to find facts about compliance and report deviations, never to fix the people or manage the projects themselves. This separation ensures objectivity.
Their Method: They use audits and reviews. They develop detailed checklists to verify that every mandatory step is being followed.
Dual Role: A great QA group does more than just check boxes. They also look for smarter ways of working and report these alternative best practices to your process improvement team for potential inclusion in the standard procedures.

Adherence is Not a Maturity Check

People often confuse Quality Assurance (QA) work with a formal CMMI Maturity Assessment. Here is the key difference:

QA/Adherence: Checks if your projects are following your company's documented policies and procedures.
Maturity Assessment: Checks if your company's policies and procedures meet the goals and practices required by the CMMI model.

What a CMMI Appraiser Looks For

A formal CMMI Maturity Assessment, conducted by a certified CMMI Appraiser, evaluates your company's process system against the CMMI-SVC model. They check three main things:

Documentation: Do you have a documented policy for the areas of work you perform?
Completeness: Do your procedures cover all the best practices (Specific Practices) required by the CMMI Maturity Level you are aiming for? We call this being 'sufficient.'
Institutionalization: Are you actually following your own system of standards and procedures? (This is where your internal Adherence work becomes the evidence!)

Defining Your Scope

You only need policies and procedures for the work you actually do.

CMMI-SVC is designed to cover a broad range of service work. If your company only performs a specific type of service (e.g., maintenance but not infrastructure development), you do not need policies for the work you don't perform. Defining this clear scope upfront is crucial for a successful and cost-effective process improvement journey.

The Expert's Role

The CMMI Process Areas define the specific needs your organization must meet for each Maturity Level. You don't need to memorize every clause.

A Qualified and Certified CMMI Appraiser knows the model intimately and will guide you. Engage an appraiser early in your process improvement journey and follow their lead for incrementally achieving your process maturity goals.

Can't I prepare myself for High Maturity?

Yes, You Can Get to Higher Maturity!

You absolutely can move your organization toward higher maturity without constantly relying on an outside expert. Maturity is built on discipline, consistency, and culture.

Here are 5 concrete steps you can start today to build that solid CMMI foundation:

Standardize Your Process: Write down the official policy for every major service area you perform. Ensure these policies and procedures are implemented uniformly across the entire company. This creates your Organizational Standard Process.
Mandate Adherence: Document the best practices and detailed steps you've implemented into formal procedures, and make adherence to these procedures mandatory for everyone. These procedures must become official, protected organizational assets.
Institutionalize Your Structures: Set up the formal groups and structures needed for organizational governance. These include your compliance evaluation group (QA), a Process Improvement Working Group to manage changes, and formalized councils for managing service risks and analyzing measurements.
Invest in Training: Create a mandatory training program to ensure that every single practitioner is trained and skilled in the specific processes they are required to follow. If you don't train them, you can't hold them accountable.
Benchmark and Learn: Don't rely only on internal knowledge. Reach out to experts and review industry models and best practices outside your company. Actively seek out and analyze new ideas that can be deployed to improve your current processes.

Make Improvement Everyone's Job

Most importantly, you must foster a culture of continuous process improvement. Make sure everyone understands that:

Improvement is Part of the Job: It's not a special project; it is part of their daily role and responsibility.
Evaluate Everything: Always be evaluating your current processes to find opportunities for refinement.
Incentivize It! Recognize and reward teams and individuals who submit and implement valuable

Closing the Loop: Tracking and Resolution

Finding a process deviation (non-compliance) is only the first step; the real value comes from ensuring it's fixed. The organization needs a simple, formal process to handle these findings:

Communicate: The QA function reports the non-compliance objectively to the project manager and other relevant stakeholders.
Analyze and Fix: The manager responsible for the work (e.g., the Project Manager or Line Manager) is responsible for investigating the finding and taking corrective action to fix the work product or adjust the immediate process.
Address the Root Cause: If the deviation is frequent or systemic, it indicates a flaw in the process itself. These issues must be escalated to the process owner for a permanent fix in the standard procedures.
Verification: The QA function must verify that the corrective action was effective and the issue is truly closed.

This system ensures that every finding leads to documented change, either in the project's work or in the company's standard process, preventing the problem from happening again.

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