What is CMM I (CMM-I1, CMM-I2)

Project management plays an important role in the competitive scenario, and achieved in the 1990s the status of methodology (Carvalho & Rabechini, Jr., 2005). Nowadays, there are more than 100,000 practitioners that earned the Project Management Professional (PMP®) certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI). This indicator highlights the increasing interest in project management area, especially in the IT companies, which are one of the top five industries in PMI’s membership numbers (PMI, 2005). The widely spread framework proposed by PMI called Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK), now in the third edition (PMBoK, 1996, 2000, 2004), has been adopted by several kinds of project-driven organization (PMI, 2004). PMBoK clusters the main project management best practices in nine key areas. Nevertheless, a research carried out by Standish Group (2003) showed high failure level in IT project in North America. The research involved about 13.522 projects, of which only 34% can be considered a success. The main causes for IT projects failure were related to user’s commitment, manager support and requirement definition. It is important to emphasize that, regarding the project success measure in historical perspective, the success rate improved if compared to the first similar research carried out in 1999, which was just 16%. Based on this scenario, this chapter presents the main organizational project management models in order to help companies to upgrade project performance.