The Trillium Model, created by a collaborative team from Bell Canada, Northern Telecom and Bell Northern Research (Northern Telecom and Bell Northern Research later merged into Nortel Networks) combines requirements from the ISO 9000 series, the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for software, and the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence Archived 2016-08-04 at the Wayback Machine, with software quality standards from the IEEE.
The Trillium Model has been developed from a customer perspective, as perceived in a competitive, commercial environment.
Levels can be characterized in the following way: The Trillium Model consists of Capability Areas, Roadmaps and Practices.
A Capability Joint Evaluation assumes an effective partnership relationship exists between the customer and supplier.
For Customer organizations, a higher capability means that: For the Development organization, achieving a higher capability can result in: The Trillium Model covers all aspects of the software development life-cycle, most system and product development and support activities, and a significant number of related marketing activities.