Capability Maturity Model

The Capability Maturity Model is an important framework that helps businesses build the capabilities that they identify as critical to their success. To grow, businesses are tasked with ensuring that their processes adapt to meet their ongoing—and often evolving—needs. The Capability Maturity Model can allow businesses to optimize their operations in ways that help the organization fulfill its objectives.

In this article, we’ll offer you an overview of the Capability Maturity Model. This may help you help your business achieve its goals, or it may be useful if you are providing consulting or advice to others.

Capability Maturity Model Definition

First, let’s start with a Capability Maturity Model definition. The original definition of the Capability Maturity Model comes from Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute. It defines the Capability Maturity Model as a five-level process of software development that organizations can implement and oversee to ensure they are developing the tools necessary to best meet their needs.

There is also a more multifaceted version of the Capability Maturity Model adapted for businesses, which is what we’ll focus on for this article. The Business Capability Maturity Model (which is sometimes called the BCM or BCM2) can be used to evaluate all the different business capacities of an organization. Basically, the Business Capability Maturity Model applies the logic and framework of the conventional Capability Maturity Model toward other aspects of a business’s operations besides simply software development. The BCM can be used to enhance overall operational performance, customer engagement, organizational design, strategic planning, and more.

Capability Maturity Model Benefits

Now let’s look at some of the different Capability Maturity Model benefits so you can better understand how implementing it might help you and your organization.

The primary benefit of the Business Capability Maturity Model is process improvement. By assessing an organization’s business processes in granular detail, the BCM can help a business evaluate where each of its processes stands in comparison with the company’s evolving needs. In particular, the BCM helps identify weaknesses and gaps between existing processes and organizational objectives.

By streamlining the evaluation process, the BCM can help promote standardization and thus efficiency, productivity, and reliability within a business’s operations.

Capability Maturity Model Example

Let’s examine a Capability Maturity Model example, so you can get a sense of what it looks like in action.

One area where a company might apply the BCM is in its supply chain logistics and management. An initial evaluation might reveal that the business’s supply chain lacks coordination between different elements, leading to unreliability and inefficiency. The BCM would map out the steps necessary to optimize the business’s supply chains, beginning with a basic integration of the supply chain. From there, the BCM envisions the fully “mature” state of the supply chain, involving highly standardized integration and processes that are fully optimized for maximum efficiency.

Capability Maturity Model Levels

The Capability Maturity Model is a standardized process that breaks the development of operational maturity into different stages, or levels.

The 5 levels of the Capability Maturity Model are:

1. 1. Initial: In the least mature state, a process is improvised, inconsistent, unpredictable, and inefficient.
   2. Repeatable: This state is achieved after basic project management standards are established, enabling the organization to—at a minimum—track costs, and predict scheduling and functionality.
   3. Defined: In this level, a specific process has been thoroughly defined by the organization, thus permitting consistent standards of practice.
   4. Managed: Here, the organization has developed the ability to measure the process for efficiency and quality control across all levels of the organization.
   5. Optimized: In the final stage, the organization has developed the ability to continually improve the process for ever-increasing levels of efficiency and operational success.

Capability Maturity Model Assessment

The BCM/CMM doesn’t just happen on its own—it requires specific attention from the organization in the form of the Capability Maturity Model assessment.

The basic stages of the Capability Maturity Model assessment include:

• • Collecting relevant data about the specific processes and capabilities in question, as well as related processes.
  • Mapping the current state of the process and using the data to compare it to the mature version of the process.
  • Assigning scores to the process area to measure performance and improvement.
  • Identifying the existing strengths and weaknesses within the process in question.
  • Forming strategic plans to improve the process and bring it toward maturity.
  • Executing those improvements.
  • Monitoring and managing the ongoing implementation of those improvements.

Capability Maturity Model Diagram

Here we’ve included a basic Capability Maturity Model diagram, which you can use and customize to define the different states of maturity for any or all of your organization’s business processes.

	Key Process Area 1	Key Process Area 2	Key Process Area 3
Initial
Repeatable
Defined
Managed
Optimized

Conclusion

Running even a small business can be chaotic. There are so many moving parts among the organization’s different interrelated processes that it can be hard to tell where improvements are most needed. The Capability Maturity Model allows you to examine each of your organization’s business processes in detail, and it helps you design a roadmap toward optimizing each of them.

Additional Resources:

• Key Trends and Challenges for the Next Decade in Organizational Transformation (Podcast)
• Strategic Intent: Definition, Overview, & Example
• Agile Transformation