Business Process Maturity Model

Understand your business process maturity!

In many companies, business processes are often carried out manually via email, phone, fax, meetings, etc. Information can be lost during these processes and if changes are involved, it could be time consuming, resulting in inefficiency. It is, therefore, important for companies to document, communicate and assign accountability for their processes. A Business Process Management (BPM) solution can manage the full scale of a process lifecycle without being restricted by departmental boundaries. BPM can help your organisation clarify and document processes, automate processes, monitor process performance, identify opportunities for improvement and deploy them successfully.

The Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM) was developed by the Object Management Group (OMG) , a not for profit international industry consortium. The model describes an evolutionary improvement path that guides organisations in moving from immature, inconsistent processes to mature, disciplined processes. In following the BPMM improvement path, organisational behaviour and culture will change allowing the organisation to produce continually improving business results.

The five levels of maturity guide an organisation to evolving from poorly defined and inconsistent practices, to repeatable practices at the unit level, to standard organisation-wide end-to-end business processes, to statistically managed and predictable processes and finally to continuous process innovation and optimisation.

© Object Management Group

The five maturity levels can be briefly described in terms of their management focus and primary objective:

Initial - “Fire-fighting management” - There are no specific objectives. Success in these organisations depends on the competence and heroics of the people in the organisation and not on the use of proven processes.

Managed - “Work unit management” - The objective is to create a management foundation within each work unit or project.

Standardised - “Process management” - The objective is to establish and use a common organisational process infrastructure and associated process assets to achieve consistency in how work is performed to provide the organisation’s products and services.

Predictable - “Capability management” - The objective is to manage and exploit the capability of the organisational process infrastructure and associated process assets to achieve predictable results with controlled variation.

Innovating - “Change management” - The objective is to continuously improve the organisation’s processes and the resulting products and services through defect and problem prevention, continuous capability, and planned innovative improvements.

The maturity level of an organisation provides a way to predict the future performance of the organisation for a given domain or set of domains. These five maturity levels reflect the fact that BPMM is a model for improving the capability of organisations.

Contact us for a free consultation session to assess your process maturity and build a process maturity path for your organisation so you can achieve your corporate goals and strategic objectives.