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Okay, I know you think I’ve completely lost my mind for talking about Capability Maturity Models (CMM) and nonprofit governance in the same sentence.  (And there I go doing it again.)  As I explained in Growth through Governance (p. 269), software engineers will very likely think I’ve lost my marbles for talking about CMM in 2016 at all.  You’re not going to apply for or achieve CMM certification, so let’s forget that and move on.  But I devote a lengthy essay in Growth through Governance to CMM because CMM provides a framework for a useful way of thinking about nonprofit capacity.  As I explained in the case of the two organizations with identical bottom-line (tactical) results but with very different capacity (p. 272), the idea of capability maturity helps us see vital information about nonprofits that budget statements can’t provide.  And, I submit that a capability-maturity way of thinking offers major advantages over the blundering charade of currently prevailing capacity and efficiency “metrics.”

In Growth through Governance, Chapter 10, I explain how I believe a CMM framework of thinking can inform fresh, relevant ideas about nonprofit capacity and efficiency that would offer a breath of fresh air in a sector too often dominated by bogus numbers such as “overhead” (see p. 277).  I think the explanation in my book probably suffices for managers and fiduciaries wishing to think about their organizations through a CMM lens.  This blog post is for readers who wish to have more in-depth information about CMM as it is currently used in industry.

First of all, I was mistaken in the book about the date of CMM’s appearance: this Carnegie-Mellon University report on CMM version 1.1 by Paulk, Curtis, Chrissis and Weber is dated February 1993.  What I got right was the date of their publication in book form, 1995.  In any case, CMM became popular in the mid-1990s and, in my opinion, sort of jumped the shark in the mid-2000s, as I explained in Growth through Governance (p. 269, see footnotes).  Essentially, the introduction of CMM Integration led to the proliferation of new CMM adaptations for particular process areas.  That enabled publishers to sell books, but — to my mind — unfortunately obscured the clarity and universality the original model had going for it, to the point where we found ourselves talking about how to build airplanes well, or how to build software well, or how to deal with people well, or how to do a confusing myriad of other things well, instead of how to do processes well in general.  It seems to me that a paradigm worth learning ought to last a while, so I really just base my thoughts on the version published in 1995 and cited in my bibliography.

In a way, the drawbacks of CMM help us understand the intention and value of CMM.  By showing where CMM falls short of its vision, the parody Capability Immaturity Model (CIMM), in addition to being hilarious and instantly recognizable by most of us, helps us see both the vision and the difficulty of achieving it.  CIMM, in fact, was introduced in a humorous but serious academic paper by an author who worked in the U.S. military.  In some ways, inasmuch as it is instantly recognizable, CIMM actually helps put in focus the topic we’re trying to talk about, that of doing processes well.

Greater depth on CMM is provided by Select Business Solutions as well as the Wikipedia article.  Finally, Karl Wiegers of Process Impact presents a concise, spot-on paper addressing common misconceptions about CMM; although it has a software focus, the misconceptions Wiegers addresses seem much more broadly applicable, and he introduces his paper with a brief, readable introduction to the five CMM levels.  (You may need to know that KPA is an acronym for Key Process Area.  For the purposes of Growth through Governance, never mind that; it’s too specific.  Application to nonprofits is more to be found in the general worldview of CMM than in the lower-level particulars of how it has been implemented and assessed in software companies.)