An assessment is similar to a larger audit. It lasts several days and involve teams that are typically made up of three to five people.

An assessment checks the operational processes and practices against the requirements of an assessment model, analyzing, in interviews, not only the direct artifacts (guidelines, work instructions, process models and indirect artifacts (protocols, reports, filled-in templates) but also the actually “practiced” processes used in a project. Sometimes the assessment team may even “look over an expert’s shoulder” at their workplace to get a clear idea of applied work practices.

CMMI and SPICE are typical assessment or appraisal examples. Maturity and capability levels assigned to organizations or individual processes are determined. Strengths and weaknesses are pointed out as well as improvement potentials and identifying opportunities for synergies and lead competencies (especially where several organizational units or projects are compared).

Out of five parts of the ISO/IEC 15504 (SPICE) standard, three deal directly with assessments:

• Part 2 – Performing an assessment
• Part 3 – Guidance on performing an assessment
• Part 5 – An assessment model and indicator guidance

The purpose of these detailed descriptions is to ensure that different assessment results can be compared and that different assessors – i.e. the persons actually conducting the assessment – diverge as little as possible in their evaluation results.

Also See:

• What is an Audit

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