Freeing Project Teams to Focus on Quality, Not Paperwork

Expression was pursuing CMMI Maturity Level 3 while also meeting several ISO quality standards, but its quality processes were largely manual and inefficient. Teams handled overlapping standards separately, with one meeting and form for CMMI and others for each ISO certification. Required tasks were often forgotten, so people had to be reminded by hand again and again. And existing automation tools went underused - like when files lived in Dropbox, but its automatic version control wasn't used to meet CMMI's version-control requirements.

Katie designed and built a quality management system in Airtable around two principles. First, take burdensome, repetitive work off people's plates wherever possible: automate CMMI-aligned practices, and use tools' built-in features, like Dropbox version history, instead of manual workarounds. Second, where a person does need to act, make it seamless: Airtable workflows assigned each task, sent reminders, and followed up automatically when it was overdue. She also mapped where CMMI and ISO overlapped and consolidated duplicate processes, so a single meeting or form with the right agenda and content met both, and rolled out the updated SOPs, QA processes, documentation standards and metrics reporting the entire system supported.

Expression easily achieved 2024 CMMI Maturity Level while replacing duplicated, manually chased processes with lean, largely automated ones.