Comparison of the Continuous and Staged Representations

Compares the advantages of each representation and may assist you with determining which representation is right for your organization.

Comparative Advantages of Continuous and Staged Representations

Continuous Representation

• Grants explicit freedom to select the order of improvement that best meets the organization’s business objectives and mitigates the organization’s areas of risk
• Enables increased visibility of the capability achieved in each individual process area
• Allows improvements of different processes to be performed at different rates
• Reflects a newer approach that does not yet have the data to demonstrate its ties to return on investment

Staged Representation

• Enables organizations to have a predefined and proven improvement path
• Focuses on a set of processes that provide an organization with a specific capability that is characterized by each maturity level
• Summarizes process improvement results in a simple form—a single maturity level number
• Builds on a relatively long history of use that includes case studies and data that demonstrate return on investment