Understanding where your organization is currently at with respect to your business needs and process goals.
How do your organization’s processes compare to the CMMI? Without understanding where you are starting, getting to your goal is just a random walk.
The main idea is to obtain this understanding (1) without disrupting the organization and (2) as quickly and inexpensively as can be achieved.
The standard way to get this understanding is through a “gap analysis”—and informal, quick look at the organization’s processes. But that is the standard way . . . BTI has pioneered using process data mining to automatically extract process performance data from an organization’s tools and databases. Although this does not entirely replace the standard gap analysis, it does make the gap analysis more thorough than could otherwise be achieved for the same effort.