H-1 WSSA Team Earns CMMI Certification

January 15 proved an exceptional day for the H-1 program’s Weapons System Support Activity (WSSA) team at China Lake, CA, when it received word it had attained a Level 3 maturity rating in the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) model, an IT industry-standard process improvement approach.

While the WSSA team started gathering data two years ago to support a CMMI appraisal, the journey really took root about four years prior when PMA-276’s Program Manager asked the WSSA team to expand their role in the development and integration of the AH-1Z and UH-1Y helicopters; WSSA was already supporting the AH-1W and the H-1’s foreign military sales customers.

“WSSA’s certification is very important to the H-1 program,” noted Colonel Harry Hewson, PMA-276’s Program Manager, “because it reinforces the WSSA's role as the mission systems integrator across all three platforms.”

Kim Schwalb, H-1 WSSA’s Integrated Product Team Lead, said the WSSA team recognized that role expansion as an opportunity to improve its business practices, and began the development of a strategic plan to position themselves for long-term sustainment of the three Marine Corps platforms as well as foreign military sales customers.

“Our Strategic Plan was the kick-off of our improvement efforts, linking numerous project and organizational changes into a comprehensive package for goal-setting, communication and execution,” Schwalb said.

That entailed tackling the update of several organizational documents, developing consistent processes to be employed across all projects, tailoring guidance, templates/forms and establishing an organizational training capability to ensure the team understood what was expected.

The appraisal involved locating and gathering enough objective evidence for approximately 358 practices, evaluating more than 700 artifacts supported by 10 interviews and 11 tool demonstrations to affirm existing data for the appraisal.

According to Hewson, the Level 3 certification is validation that H-1 WSSA is using the essential elements of effective processes that ultimately improve performance. It links their work to the PMA's objectives, gives management visibility into the work being done to ensure that all software projects meet our cost, schedule and technical requirements, and it encourages the use of industry-wide best practices.

“All of our efforts paid off with our achievement of the Level 3 CMMI rating,” noted Schwalb. “However, we really do view this as just a snapshot of where we are today. As we say in our Strategic Plan, “value of performance is a moving target” and we must continually strive to do better.”

Source: Naval Air Systems Command