The key to successful change is measuring and understanding the right things with a focus on capabilities—not on maturity.
Third, capability models focus on key outcomes and how the capabilities, or levers, drive improvement in those outcomes—that is, they are outcome based. This provides technical leadership with clear direction and strategy on high-level goals (with a focus on capabilities to improve key outcomes). It also enables team leaders and individual contributors to set improvement goals related to the capabilities their team is focusing on for the current time period. Most maturity models simply measure the technical proficiency or tooling install base in an organization without tying it to outcomes. These end up being vanity metrics: while they can be relatively easy to measure, they don’t tell us anything about the impact they have on the business.
Second, our measure should focus on outcomes not output: it shouldn’t reward people for putting in large amounts of busywork that doesn’t actually help achieve organizational goals.