Certifications
Each quarter, Program Managers submit employees for consideration for the Continuous Improvement Award. This award provides recognition of an individual’s contribution in identifying and implementing continuous improvement suggestions that benefit their customer in the quality of services, products and processes they support. This quarters’ awardees are a little different because they don’t work directly on customer facing programs but are instead headquarters personnel who have been working to improve our Quality Management System.
Since Aug 2018, Nancy Koger has been working towards our CMMI for Services Level 3 certification. Along the way, as our Process Group Lead, she led efforts for the Surveillance Audit in March of 2019 and the Certification Audit in March of 2020 to maintain our existing ISO 9001:2015 Certification. While this was happening, Nancy was leading our efforts to get us ready for a brand-new quality certification, Capability Maturity Model Integration, or CMMI® for Services Level 3. It’s much easier for organizations to start at Level 2, operate there for a while, and then move up to Level 3, but Nancy took us straight to Level 3. Because of her hard work and leadership, Ignite achieved CMMI for Services Level 3 on our first attempt! We received our official notification from the CMMI Institute that our appraisal was accepted on February 10, 2020.
In March of 2019, Carol Coffey was asked to be the Quality Manager for Ignite – responsible for Ignite internal process audits. As such, she needed both ISO and CMMI training to understand those requirements but also to act as an appraisal team member for the CMMI certification. As a process group team member, she helped to finalize process documentation and artifact collection in preparation for the CMMI appraisal. She was also part of the 5-member CMMI appraisal team (4 members were consultants) responsible for analyzing all aspects of our processes and interviewing team members. This required long, focused hours for 2 months all in the midst of her regular job as VP of Marketing and Proposals. She was instrumental in us achieving our CMMI certification.