Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM)

The development of the Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM) began in 2002 but the lineage can be traced back much further.
The origin of modern quality management practices is usually traced back to Walter Shewart, working at Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1920s and 1930s. This original work was further refined by W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran. In the 1970s Philip Crosby conceived of a quality management maturity grid to incrementally improve quality.
In the 1980s, Watts Humphrey, working at IBM, explored how to best introduce quality practices into software organizations. The approach he and his colleagues developed was a staged introduction of practices. This approach led to the development of the process maturity framework that was the basis for the first CMM - the CMM for Software. Version 1.0 of the CMM for Software was released in August 1991 [Weber-1991] [Paulk-1991].
In early 2002 Barry Hore, the Chief Executive of Nedbank Limited, Technology and Operations (T&O) in South Africa, and the T&O Executive Committee began to realize that the value they were achieving with the CMM for Software might also be achieved in the rest of their banking operations - if these same process maturity principles could be adapted and applied in the operations. Since over 80 percent of their business was operations, proportionately larger benefits could be achieved in that part of the business. The Executive Committee at that time included Barry Hore, John Cruickshank, Michael Gould, Mike Jarvis, Andre Meyer, Willie Scholtz, Len de Villiers, and Harry Wilson.
Barry contacted TeraQuest Metrics to work on a model to cover the rest of their business. The model development was initiated in April 2002, with the initial focus on a Service Operations CMM. TeraQuest worked with Nedbank managers and staff to develop an understanding of service operations and gather practices for the model. Nedbank was instrumental in formulating the strategy for developing and applying the Service Operations CMM within their organization. But just as important, they committed the funding and resources to make the Service Operations CMM a reality. They also decided, very early in their discussions, that this model would not be a Nedbank-only model, but would be made available to the international community.
Over the next few years, the Service Operations CMM was applied in several companies in various industries. In applying it, it became clear that the service operations practices in the model were very close to the practices applicable to the general problem of developing, preparing, deploying, operating, and supporting products and services in any industry - covering the full life cycle from conception to retirement. With continuing support of Nedbank and other companies, the authors evolved the Service Operations CMM into the BPMM.
TeraQuest Metrics was acquired by Borland Software Corporation in January 2005.
Charles Weber is the BPMM project manager. The author team includes Charles Weber and Bill Curtis, from Borland, and Tony Gardiner, from Nedbank.
Several other people contributed to the concepts and practices in this document. The contributors are listed in Section 6.2.
The BPMM is intended for anyone interested or involved in improving an organization's business process related to their products and services - whether the products and services are for internal or external use. This includes members of appraisal teams, members of process engineering groups, managers, and professional staff. The BPMM can be used as a process model by itself or it can be used as a framework for improvement efforts based on other models such as the Control OBjectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT) [COBIT-2000], Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) [ITIL-2002], and ISO-9000 [ISO-2005].