Raytheon Australia reaches another significant milestone in CMMI process accreditation.

Toward the end of 2009, Raytheon Australia conducted independent appraisals on the last of the selected 18 CMMI process areas, to meet our goal to be the Mission Systems Integrator and Mission Support company of choice to our defence customer. As a result, Raytheon Australia is the first Defence company to reach CMMI level 3 company wide (see below). The appraisals have demonstrated that Raytheon Australia has a suite of processes and tools that supports all Raytheon Australia projects (ie: development and sustainment type projects). Raytheon Australia’s lead appraiser commented that ‘Raytheon Australia has amongst the best processes in terms of their ranging applicability, practicality, structure and flexibility… it is a real credit to Raytheon Australia to reach this significant milestone’.

Dr Terry Stevenson (Raytheon Australia’s Chief Technology Officer) reflected on this event saying ‘that this is a real demonstration that Raytheon Australia has embraced best practise and its use across the company. ’ He went on to say that ‘many other companies had commenced the CMMI ‘journey’ and very few have succeeded. Raytheon Australia should be proud of this achievement …’ and went on to recall the ‘journey’.

But first, ‘what is CMMI’? The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®) is a model based process improvement framework to support organizational process maturation. CMMI has been developed, with Defence and industry, by Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute (SEI). In short, this model has real pedigree and covers the areas of business management (ie: process management in CMMI terms), project management, engineering, and support. In addition, the SEI provides extensions to the model to support focus areas for businesses. Raytheon Australia has selected the ‘+Safe’ extension to further bolster the safety management and safety engineering process areas.

Like all models, the CMMI model has levels and most organisations are generally at Level 0, 1 with some at Level 2. Level 3 is a huge step-up and there are very few organisations in Australia at this level of maturity.

As for our journey to reach CMMI level 3, Raytheon Australia chose the longer, but more successful, route of developing the business processes at the company level and integrating these with the projects. However, this did not happen overnight and our endeavours started in late 2004 when the CMMI proposal was put to Raytheon Australia’s Leadership Team and approved to commence in early 2005. Since then, Raytheon Australia has successfully integrated sound project management practises, Raytheon Six Sigma™ (R6s) and CMMI. In 2006, Raytheon Australia showcased the integration of PM, CMMI and R6s, and the Australian Institute of Project Managers (AIPM) judged this approach as the best in Australia; awarding Raytheon Australia with the Project of the year for change management. This was another first for Raytheon Australia in the Defence and Defence Industry arena.

Over the past five years Raytheon Australia has invested in excess of $2.8m in the CMMI project to reach CMMI level 3. The credit for this success has been due to our excellent people who have developed the suite of processes, used them in the projects and then participated in the appraisals and, the best thing of all, did this while meeting our commitments to our Customer and growing the company.

In a recent event in Canberra, Michael Ward (Managing Director Raytheon Australia) commented on the success of achieving the CMMI level 3 profile and went onto to say ‘Raytheon Australia is not going to rest here, we will continue to invest in CMMI to maintain this excellent gain, as well as develop other areas to ensure that we service our people, our projects and our Customer. The journey continues and we need to ensure that we can adapt to our environment and continue to provide the best practise solutions in these challenging times. ’