Process
Areas
(staged)

Level 2
 
REQM
 PP
 PMC
 SAM
 MA
 PPQA
 CM
Level 3
 
RD
 TS
 PI
 VER 
 VAL 
 OPF
 OPD
 OT
 IPM
 RSKM
 DAR
Level 4
 
OPP
 QPM
Level 5 
 
OPM 
 CAR

          3.3. Tying It All Together
              Understanding Maturity Levels
 Maturity Level 5: Optimizing 

At maturity level 5, an organization continually improves its processes based on a quantitative understanding of its business objectives and performance needs. The organization uses a quantitative approach to understand the variation inherent in the process and the causes of process outcomes.

Maturity level 5 focuses on continually improving process performance through incremental and innovative process and technological improvements. The organization’s quality and process performance objectives are established, continually revised to reflect changing business objectives and organizational performance, and used as criteria in managing process improvement. The effects of deployed process improvements are measured using statistical and other quantitative techniques and compared to quality and process performance objectives. The project’s defined processes, the organization’s set of standard processes, and supporting technology are targets of measurable improvement activities.

A critical distinction between maturity levels 4 and 5 is the focus on managing and improving organizational performance. At maturity level 4, the organization and projects focus on understanding and controlling performance at the subprocess level and using the results to manage projects. At maturity level 5, the organization is concerned with overall organizational performance using data collected from multiple projects. Analysis of the data identifies shortfalls or gaps in performance. These gaps are used to drive organizational process improvement that generates measureable improvement in performance.



Process
Areas
(continuous)


Process
management  
 
OPF
 OPD
 OT  
 
OPP  
 OPM

Project
management
 
PP
 PMC 
 REQM 
 
SAM  
 
IPM
 RSKM
 
QPM

Engineering
 
RD 
 TS
 PI
 VER 
 VAL
Support
 
CM
 PPQA
 MA
 
DAR
 CAR