Assessing BPM Maturity: Understanding the 7 Core Capabilities

At the most basic level, maturity means something has reached a particular stage of growth or development. Generally, we would consider this stage to be an ‘optimal point’, beyond which you stop seeing improvement, and may even see some decline. Think of a fine wine getting even better with age, a banana slowly ripening, or a leather jacket getting softer and smoother as the years pass.
People also mature and develop automatically, though of course there are many facets to maturity. We can ask in what respect someone is mature; for some people maturity is totally unconnected from their age. Some will have reached great maturity through general life experience, while others are characterized by a greater tendency towards collaboration and cohesion with others.
In these examples, for both people and other things, the maturation is natural and automatic. With modern techniques, these changes can be controlled, guided, or slowed. For example, selective breeding means we can now make tastier bananas available for a longer period of time, ensuring a more enjoyable product is available to consumers for longer, while also increasing sales for the supplier. Personal growth and maturity can also be systematically improved, for example through the education system.
In a business context, people’s natural abilities and skills can be developed further via additional training or coaching. This ‘systemic maturation’ has a number of beneficial effects, including:
However, these natural abilities and skills require the right environment to be brought to the fore.
As we noted above, maturity can encompass many characteristics. When we look at business process management, a whole range of components must be working together within a business to ensure any process management initiative is effective. The table below summarizes the seven core capabilities that a business must demonstrate, in order to ensure they have the right environment for a successful process management framework:
An organization can assess their achievements for each of these seven capabilities, by asking:
The answers to these questions contribute towards building the core capabilities of BPM maturity, which can, in turn, be measured on a spectrum. The list below outlines the characteristics at each stage of this spectrum, beginning with the lowest level of BPM maturity, the ad hoc approach.
It is useful for any organization to know where they stand on the BPM maturity spectrum, but it becomes crucial for organizations seeking to advance their maturity, and reach the ‘leading’ stage. Assessing BPM maturity in this way requires a framework that can:
For businesses of all shapes and sizes, assessing BPM maturity is a way of thinking about the question, “Where am I, and where am I going next?”
The Signavio Consulting team brings decades of experience to bear on assessing BPM maturity within organizations, and recommending the best ways to get where you want to go. The diagram below shows a visual representation of the support Signavio offers to build up the seven process management core capabilities, and move an organization across to the higher end of the BPM maturity spectrum:
Assessing BPM maturity with Signavio takes no more than a single working day. Structured and guided interviews are conducted with stakeholders, for around 60-90 minutes each. Signavio then prepares a comprehensive summary, aggregation, and gap analysis of assessments, statements and conclusions from the interviews. We will then work directly with you to conduct a joint interpretation of the results, before supplying a series of recommendations for future action.
Assessing BPM maturity with Signavio is simple, fast, and effective, and can make a massive difference to your business. Stop wondering where you’re going, and get there—fast.
If you’re ready for your very own BPM maturity assessment, contact Signavio Consulting today at consulting@signavio.com Or, if you’d prefer to see how the Signavio Business Transformation Suite can help improve your business, sign up for a free 30-day trial today.