Our organization just started the CMMI journey and management wants to hit Level 3 within 18 months. We're currently doing an informal gap assessment and it's pretty clear we're not even solidly at Level 1 practices yet. I'm studying for the Associate exam while also trying to help the team understand what the process areas actually mean in practice.
From my reading, Level 2 is about project-level discipline — you're doing the same things consistently within a single project. Level 3 is where you standardize across the organization and have defined processes that every team follows. The jump from 2 to 3 seems massive in terms of documentation and institutional buy-in required.
I've done about 40 hours of study across the CMMI V2.0 reference model and I'm scoring around 72% on practice questions. The practice areas I'm weakest on are Supplier Management and Governance. Anyone have good resources for those specifically?
For Supplier Management, the key thing the exam tests is whether you understand the difference between monitoring supplier agreements versus actively managing supplier performance. Those two feel similar but the model treats them very differently in terms of evidence required.
The gap between Level 2 and Level 3 is almost entirely an organizational culture problem, not a technical one. In my experience helping two companies through appraisals, Level 3 takes 12-24 months to stabilize even after you think you're ready. 18 months is ambitious but doable if leadership actually funds the effort.
One thing that tripped me up: CMMI V2.0 made significant changes from V1.3. If your study materials are more than a few years old, double check they're referencing the right version. The practice area names changed in several places.
I passed my Associate exam with a 79% after about 35 hours of prep. The exam has more scenario questions than I expected — maybe 40% of it — so knowing the definitions cold isn't enough, you need to be able to apply them to a described situation.