March 16, 2005

TCG Helping NIH Achieve CMMI Level 2

Formalizing best practices to achieve higher efficiencies

Washington, DC, March 16, 2005: TCG, a leading provider of IT and management advisory services solutions to the Federal government, today announced that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Center for Information Technology (CIT), Division of Enterprise and Custom Applications (DECA) has retained the company to provide CMMI Mentoring Services. CIT/DECA supports the NIH enterprise through development and management of administrative and business applications. CIT/DECA provides full life cycle application development and support services for the NIH and its Institutes and Centers. In its efforts to improve the delivery of high quality software to the NIH, CIT/DECA is taking advantage of industry accepted project management processes based on CMMI.

CMMI is the de facto worldwide standard of excellence in software engineering. Studies have shown that adherence to CMMI standards results in decreased project costs, increased schedule predictability, improved product quality, increased customer satisfaction, and a positive return on investment. The appraisal is extremely difficult to obtain and demands rigor and commitment throughout the organization. TCG’s CMMI Mentoring Service is focused on accelerating the process of achieving a successful appraisal, and is tailored to suit corporate budgets.

“We have worked with NIH for a decade and have always admired the agency’s commitment to process excellence,” said Daniel Turner, President of TCG. “I am delighted that TCG will contribute further to that commitment by providing the innovative CMMI Mentoring Service to NIH.”

TCG’s CMMI Level 2 Mentoring Services include :

  • An in-depth program of basic and optional sessions designed to assist small software development organizations in acquiring the knowledge and tools they need to achieve a successful CMMI appraisal. The program consists of a series of step-by-step training sessions, starting with creating the organizational infrastructure necessary to support CMMI, continuing on through the implementation of defined processes within an existing project, and culminating with a process improvement schedule that will ensure the organization continues along the path toward a successful CMMI appraisal.
  • Regular, ongoing advisory services support for the CMMI process improvement efforts, including participation in the Software Engineering Process Office (SEPO, or equivalent), documentation and artifact reviews, one-on-one mentoring, training of additional staff, and assistance with appraisal preparation.

TCG’s CMMI Mentoring Services are not merely a series of training sessions. The company will provide DECA with a hands-on program in which participants will create the policies, process descriptions, tools, and infrastructure necessary for implementing and sustaining CMMI best practices.

About TCG
TCG (Turner Consulting Group, https://stage.tcg.com), a Washington, DC-based company, specializes in delivering grants management solutions to the Federal government, and is responsible for pioneering integration work with Grants.gov, the government’s grants applications portal.

The company was SEI-assessed at Capability Maturity Model Integration Maturity Level 2 (CMMI Level 2 for Software as defined by the CMMI version 1.1) in April 2004 after an intense nine-month effort and is one of about 701 companies worldwide to have achieved such recognition of process excellence.

TCG focuses on helping government agencies use the power of the Internet and the Web to better interact with the public, and to generate internal cost savings and efficiencies. TCG projects have won awards for their groundbreaking achievements, including piloting the first inter-agency grants management system, and creating the first inter-agency government system to receive secure information from the general public. That system, Interagency Edison (http://www.iedison.gov), was built in 1995 for NIH’s specific needs. Today the system serves the invention and patent reporting requirements of 21 Federal agencies.

TCG was one of the fastest-growing privately-held companies in the United States in 2001, as ranked by Inc. magazine. The firm has been on Washington Technology’s Fast 50.

For more information, contact David G. Cassidy on 202–742-8471 or david.cassidy@tcg.com.

About SEI and CMMI
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense through the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics [OUSD (AT&L)].

The SEI’s core purpose is to help others make measured improvements in their software engineering capabilities.

SEI has developed six Capability Maturity Models. CMMI is the result of SEI’s continuing efforts to define maturity models that describe best practices for engineering organizations. Prior to CMMI, SEI defined Software CMM (SW-CMM), which has now been sunset to encourage adoption of CMMI.

The SEI’s goals in developing CMMs include;

  • addressing software engineering and other disciplines that have an affect on software development and maintenance
  • providing integrated process improvement reference models
  • building broad community consensus
  • harmonizing with related standards
  • enabling efficient improvement across disciplines relevant to software development and maintenance

More information about SEI and CMMI can be found at http://www.sei.cmu.edu.