Hi,

I have a question about (business)process maturity. With maturity i mean the ad-hoc, defined, managed, optimizing stages for a process. I believe that the highest level is not a goal itself for every (business)process, but how do you define this for a particular (business)process what the necessary level of maturity is? What are the factors in a (business)process that defines this, or could give you an idea what is needed (maturity).

I'm familiar with BPMM (Business Process Maturity Model), but this is focusing on the different management principles, and not the (business)process itself. Ofcourse this is important and related.

Thanks in advance.

Hello Steenus,

The stages that you cite are the stages taken from CMM (Capability Maturity Model). The stages represent how well defined a business process is and provide a route for organisational improvement. 

I agree that the highest level will not be everybody's goal; International Consulting houses will strive for Level 5 (Vendors), whilst corporates (Clients), typically in my experience, commence initiatives to move from adhoc / repeatable to defined. There is no set standard for how mature a process must be, it is at the discretion of the process owners and executive decision makers in the organisation itself i.e. banks and retailers may have opposing perspectives on process formality. However, I would suggest that the required maturity level exists at the value chain level and/or high-level business process level i.e. manufacturing, sales, marketing, customer services and not at any layer lower in the process decomposition and that that the maturity of processes are always within one stage of one another e.g. that all Process A is at repeatable and all Process B is defined, otherwise an imbalance may occur.  

The factors that define maturity will depend on the process itself, as an SDLC process and an Invoice Processing process have different deliverables, qualities, require different skills, different timings, different needs for accuracy etc  

Hope this helps,

Joe

Training slides are geared for novices, managers, trainers and consultants.

The OSSS Process Management course demonstrates how to identify and select key business processes and how to fully characterize, improve and manage them. It can be used for self-study and/or training your organization. This course has been designed to build your knowledge and capability to improve the performance of processes and subsequently the performance of your business.