Primarily, improving your business maturity makes good business sense. It frees up your biggest asset, your employees, to add more value back to your business, your customers, your products, and services. It also leads to employee satisfaction when things are less chaotic and more predictable.
The performance of an organization is characterized by its maturity level. By experience, companies do their best when they focus on a manageable number of process areas at a time and understand that those areas require increasing sophistication as the company improves.
A maturity level is a defined evolutionary plateau for organizational process improvement. Each maturity level prepares an important subset of the organization’s processes to move to the next level. The maturity levels are measured by achieving specific and generic goals associated with each set of process areas.
The CMMI Institute released a capability maturity model that identifies five maturity levels, each representing a layer in the foundation for ongoing process improvement.
Unpredictable and reactive.
Level 1 is defined by inconsistency. This level of maturity has no applied standards. Work still gets completed, but companies deal with guaranteed project overruns which results in delays and budget overruns.
Managed on the project level.
In this level some process standardization exists, with most processes still immature. The standardized processes are defined and documented, adding some benefit to the organization. At this stage, all major projects are planned, performed, measured and controlled, usually in a central tool. The primary focus is on getting basic governance standards and processes set up for reviewing project requests. Basic prioritization may begin at this point with rudimentary understanding of resource capacity management.
Proactive, rather than reactive.
Level 3 is a significant step for the organization as processes are well defined and established throughout the organization, with process documentation easily available. The availability of documentation is often realized through a Project Completions Software.
These Organization-wide standards provide guidance across projects, programs, and portfolios. This gives an organization the opportunity to be proactive, rather than reactive.
Level 3 signifies the big step from a single project view to an organizational view. In level 1 and 2 the emphasis was placed on individual projects. Level 3, brings a better understanding on how projects interact with each other.
Measured and controlled.
Level 4 marks the advance of an organization in its use of project management by utilizing optimization techniques to drive even greater value to the business with little or no extra cost. A Project Completions Software makes accurate and up-to-date project information available to the organization, allowing the collecting of higher quality data. This makes the organization data-driven with quantitative performance improvement objectives that are predictable and align to meet the needs of internal and external stakeholders.
Stable and flexible.
In Level 5 the organization is focused on continuous improvement and is built to pivot and respond to opportunity and change. The organization’s stability provides a platform for agility and innovation.
The key difference to level 4 is the higher organizational rigor and process discipline of the organization, as well as the proactively use of optimization techniques with little or no resistance.
The ability to effectively manage and systematically improve processes starts with standardization and documentation:
Documenting key processes facilitates consistency and, along with process standardization, provides managers the means to hold staff accountable for execution of said processes.
A boat will not reach its destination unless everyone on rowing duty moves in the same direction. This holds true in business, too.
Establishing clear, measurable, and attainable practice goals – setting the direction – is the first key to success. The next is aligning the goals of the owner and staff with those of the practice, ensuring everyone is rowing in the same direction.
After determining the different maturity levels, you may have an idea of where your company is in terms of its maturity. Regardless of your company’s maturity level, implementing a project completions software is an easy and fast solution of increasing the maturity of your organization.
Arbiter’s Project Completions Software digitizes all your project’s documentation, making it available throughout your whole organization. Arbiter also manages these documents, to make them easy to find and available with the click of a button, exactly where they are needed.
More benefits to increase your company’s maturity level are:
Arbiter Completions & Controls is a project completions software, that enables customers to efficiently execute projects of any size, helping the project to stay on track, prevent project overruns, and ensure that you retain the profit that you anticipated. Arbiter will help your company document your project processes, chart your process flow, and build check sheets for each activity in the process. As your project progresses, project check sheets are updated in real-time, which allow for project status transparency on all levels, and real time reporting to help you make the decisions needed to keep your project on track. By implementing Arbiter, your company will undergo the process of standardizing your process flows, eliminating redundancy and waste in your project process, and ensuring your processes are streamlined, resulting in increased quality of your end product.
Book a discovery call today to learn more about Arbiter Completions & Controls, and see why companies like yours are using our
product to take their company to the next level.
