"Saying it's all about the people, is just as myopic as saying it's all about the technology"
Capability engineering is the process of performing planning, change management, and governance across bundles of people, process, information, and technology.
I was always disappointed by the capability maturity models such as the CMMI Capability Maturity Model. Even if you've never heard of CMMI you are probably familiar with the sort of maturity scales that look something like this:
The problem I saw when trying to manage to such a scale (circa 1997-2001) was that the process tended to be to implement a whole bunch of detailed documentation to get to level 2 and 3, then implement a whole bunch of measures and metrics against the processes defined to get to level 4, then strip it all aware to make the process customisable to get to level 5 (breaking all of your metrics).
Even back in in the late 1990s it was becoming clear that agile aways of working would make this sort of maturity model obsolete for some (if not all) types of capabilities. Also, this approach was too focused on creating functional excellence (not a bad thing in itself, but) at the expense of integrating the capability with the rest of the organisation.
My Business Capability Maturity Model is a way of addressing that. The approach focuses on how others view the capability; rather than the operation of the capability itself.
See original post here: