Organizational Process Focus (OPF) Process Area in CMMi

The purpose of Organizational Process Focus (OPF) is to plan, implement, and deploy organizational process improvements based on a thorough understanding of current strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s processes and process assets.

The organization’s processes include all processes used by the organization and its projects. Candidate improvements to the organization’s processes and process assets are obtained from various sources, including the measurement of processes, lessons learned in implementing processes, results of process appraisals, results of product evaluation activities, results of benchmarking against other organizations’ processes, and recommendations from other improvement initiatives in the organization.
Process improvement occurs in the context of the organization’s needs and is used to address the organization’s objectives.

Specific Practices by Goal

SG 1: Determine Process Improvement Opportunities
Strengths, weaknesses, and improvement opportunities for the organization's processes are identified periodically and as needed.
- SP 1.1 Establish Organizational Process Needs
Establish and maintain the description of the process needs and objectives for the organization.
- SP 1.2 Appraise the Organization's Processes
Appraise the organization's processes periodically and as needed to maintain an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Process appraisals may be performed for the following reasons :
To identify processes that should be improved

To confirm progress and make the benefits of process improvement visible.

To satisfy the needs of a customer-supplier relationship.
To motivate and facilitate buy-in.
- SP 1.3 Identify the Organization's Process Improvements
Identify improvements to the organization's processes and process assets. Typical Work Products :
Analysis of candidate process improvements.
Identification of improvements for the organization's processes.

SG 2 Plan and Implement Process Improvement Activities
- SP 2.1 Establish Process Action Plans
Establishing and maintaining process action plans typically involves the following roles:
Management steering committees to set strategies and oversee process improvement activities.

Process group staff to facilitate and manage process improvement activities.
Process action teams to define and implement process actions.
Process owners to manage deployment.
Practitioners to perform the process.
- SP 2.2 Implement Process Action Plans

SG 3 Deploy Organizational Process Assets and Incorporate Lessons Learned
- SP 3.1 Deploy Organizational Process Assets.
Deploying organizational process assets or changes to organizational process assets should be performed in an orderly manner. Some organizational process assets or changes to organizational process assets may not be appropriate for use in some parts of the organization.
- SP 3.2 Deploy Standard Processes.
Deploy the organization’s set of standard processes to projects at their startup and deploy changes to them as appropriate throughout the life of each project. It is important that new projects use proven and effective processes to perform critical early activities.
- SP 3.3 Monitor Implementation.
By monitoring implementation, the organization ensures that the organization’s set of standard processes and other process assets are appropriately deployed to all projects. Monitoring implementation also helps the organization develop an understanding of the organizational process assets being used and where they are used within the organization.
- SP 3.4 Incorporate Process-Related Experiences into the Organizational Process Assets.