As with any improvement journey, it is useful at some point to know where we are and what we have achieved. Maybe we also want to communicate to the market and our customers how good we are. In these situations, it may be useful to conduct a CMMI appraisal and obtain a CMMI rating.

The most commonly used CMMI rating is a Maturity Level. You can think of each level as rungs on a ladder or steps on a podium. The Maturity Level shows that an organization’s processes incorporate a set of predefined content from the CMMI model. There are five Maturity Levels defined, with Maturity Level 1 (or ML1 for short) representing the bottom of the scale and ML5 the top. Because the content of a Maturity Level is predefined (by ISACA) it can easily be used to benchmark the organization.

But sometimes, we don’t want to wait until we have done everything in a Maturity Level or maybe the full content of a Maturity Level doesn’t feel appropriate to our situation. However, we may still want people to recognize what we are good at. In this case, we might examine a small number of Practice Areas and obtain a measure of our progress, a Capability Level, in each one. The resultant Capability Level Profile may all we need.