What does business process maturity mean? #bpm

I will cohost a webinar with Northrop Grumman on May 31st to discuss and field questions on the APQC Frameworks Study and process maturity. To download the Study with webinar details, click on the image below.

From a process perspective, companies grow up and mature the same way humans do. They nearly always start in a vulnerable place much like human infancy, and just like us, their eventual success is tied to their ability to align around positive behaviors, limit negative behaviors and create a self-sustaining, valuable niche in the economic system in which they participate.

Maturity isn’t determined by age in a company any more than in a human. Yes, it trends that way, but a company is only achieving a high level of maturity, just like a person, when they respond to circumstances or their environment in an appropriate and adaptive manner, something that comes from culture, not longevity in the market. This is a learned response and isn’t automatic by any stretch. It takes effort and varying amounts of time to develop.

Human maturity

We place such a high value on human maturity because it is what fundamentally makes our society work well. If we stop to think about human maturity, most people would say it represents:

• Willingness to pass up immediate pleasure in favor of long-term gain
• Perseverance — the ability to ‘sweat out’ a task or situation in spite of discouragements
• Capacity to face unpleasantness and frustration, discomfort and defeat, without complaint or collapse. In a word: Patience.
• Making a decision and standing by it, but tempered with humility and the ability to admit when wrong and change course
• Dependability and keeping one’s word

It is no surprise that the word applies the same way to business process. When things go wrong, it is our level of process maturity that determines how we face the challenge. If we don’t have established rules/boundaries, established paths to follow, and established escalation models, just like humans, we fall back on negative behaviors, become confused and disorganized, and lose our customers and our way. When significant adversity arises in a company with immature processes, it becomes the Land of Broken Promises and Relationships. The best customers and employees desert the ship very quickly.

Frameworks and maturity

So how does a group of distinct individuals, together mostly by economic incentive, actually mature? Are there ways to speed the process and lessen the growing pains? The shortest and wisest path involves learning from what others have done and blending that with their own personality. What others have done is found readily in the many frameworks that support everything from process classification as defined by the APQC (the APQC PCF) to maturity itself in the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). These frameworks represent a structure for moving from here to maturity in a wide variety of areas. They can be adapted from their original form, overlaid to find gaps, linked to activities to carry metrics upward, and used to prove adherence to regulations or industry-accepted standards. Being able to apply a framework is a level of maturity in itself, and being able to apply and manage multiple standards is an even higher level. During the webinar, I’ll provide specific examples of each level.

Value of frameworks

Frameworks bring an enormous amount of value to the table when managed well. In ascending order, frameworks bring:

• A common vocabulary for the business conversation (internally and externally)
• A reference model that allows the particular to be aligned to the standard way of doing things
• An end-to-end representation of how business is done
• A tool for metrics and benchmarking of the organization against itself and others
• A way to execute the organization’s strategy and goals

A worthy goal

In the end, process maturity is the state you wish to reach. It is the ideal place to be and a a worthy goal with tangible steps and measures along the way. It can be different for different businesses and should be. Maturity in a fast-evolving market, like mobile technology, will be vastly different from maturity in a more traditional market, like legal services. Process maturity is ultimately described by how well the behaviors, practices and activities of an organization can reliably and sustainably produce required outcomes. It is when the people within the organization know their roles, their baseline of behaviors and appropriate escalation in any given situation.

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Christopher Taylor