An exploratory study of why organizations do not adopt CMMI

This paper explores why organizations do not adopt CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration), by analysing two months of sales data collected by an Australian company selling CMMI appraisal and improvement services. The most frequent reasons given by organizations were: the organization was small; the services were too costly, the organization had no time, and the organization was using another SPI approach. Overall, we found small organizations not adopting CMMI tend to say that adopting it would be infeasible, but do not say it would be unbeneficial. We comment on the significance of our findings and research method for SPI research.