Measuring Process Maturity and Implementation Approach

There are many maturity models available but IT Service Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is the most appropriate one to measure the IT Service processes of organiations. The purpose of the IT Service CMM is to help organization assess their capabilities and provide directions for improvement of their capability.

Measuring maturity is not so difficult. It requires a thorough understanding of the Maturity Model to be able to use it and apply it consistently. You can learn to do the maturity assessment yourself but it takes time, a process management consultant/expert will be able to do it for you quickly and accurately.

The higher your organizations maturity the more efficient and effective the processes are. ITIL offers three types of implementation plans: Single Process approach, Multi Process Approach and All Process approach. If your maturity measurement result indicates lower levels then you should take single process apporoach. If your maturity indicator is at level three and higher then you should take multi process implementation approach.

Atleast two persons in the organization should learn the tools and techniques to perform maturity assessments. Measuring the effectiveness of the processes is a continuous exercise and therefore the benefit of doing assessments yourself not only reduces costs but it also increases the success rate and better decision making and more importantly increase alignment with business. You can read a white paper on ITIL Process Maturity by Pink Elephant here.

Planning to Implement ITIL (The "Green Book" in ITIL Version 2) gives you a road map to implement ITIL.