What’s the point of all this?
If you determine the ‘maturity’ of your processes, you can do several things:
- compare your processes against each other, determine the worst processes and prioritise them for improvement
- compare your processes against other organisations, either for your own understanding of the level of your processes or for use in competitive tender situations
e.g. US Dept of Defense requires subcontracted software development organisations to have a CMMI Maturity Level of 5 in order to be even considered
- Monitor improvement of your processes over time and obtain feedback as to the effectiveness of your improvement actions
- Use it as a baseline to prevent process maturity from slipping backwards