For the last month, we have been working on an automated self-appraisal method. This effort was motivated by the need of our customers who, while realizing the necessity of appraisal for process improvement, find existing appraisal methods expensive and time consuming. These organizations have concluded that regular self-appraisals would enhance their internal process improvement programs.

Automation of appraisal method significantly reduces the cost and duration of appraisals. The other benefits of automation include objectivity, consistency, and accessibility. Objectivity is critical to any appraisal process. By definition appraisals must be objective and unbiased. Consistency across appraisals makes incremental process improvement meaningful. Accessibility democratizes the appraisal process by allowing people involved in the organization’s process improvement initiative to assess their processes, at any time, in a self-serve manner.

This appraisal method meets a subset of Appraisal Requirements for CMMI (ARC) V1.2. Although ARC defines the requirements considered essential to appraisal method intended for use with CMMI models, not all appraisal methods are expected to be fully ARC-compliant. We selected the relevant subset of ARC with the largest benefit for the effort. In future posts, I discuss these requirements in more details.

We are building the first iteration of the appraisal method on top of IRIS Process Author.