Issues in the Assessment of Organizational Maturity

Abstract

The evaluation of the "maturity" of organizations involved in systems and software engineering has become an important issue. It is generally agreed that a rating of "maturity" should be able to be derived from the set of process capability ratings (the "process profile") obtained from a formal process assessment. However, there are issues in the determination of "maturity" using existing approaches; among the major concerns are the scope of the organizational unit for which a valid determination of maturity can be made; the minimum scope of the process model that can be used for such an assessment; and the degree of rigor required in the assessment. This paper clarifies a number of these issues, and describes the work in progress to develop a new part of the International Standard for Process Assessment that will cover the topic of assessment of organizational maturity.