Like any large and complex product, SharePoint can be used in different ways, from the simplest scenarios to the most advanced ones.

The biggest and most common mistake when implementing SharePoint is trying to use all of its features at once, while also attempting to develop custom solutions on the platform. In other words, trying to do more than the organization is ready for.

So, what is the right approach? How can SharePoint be useful to a particular organization? I think this is a good place to introduce the concept of CMM, which can help us classify organizations according to their level of maturity.

CMM

According to CMM, all organizations…

In November 1986, the American Software Engineering Institute (SEI) began developing an overview of software development process maturity to help organizations improve their internal processes.

This work was initiated in response to a request from the US federal government for a method to evaluate software development contractors. The main problem was their ability—or inability—to manage large projects. Many companies were delivering projects significantly behind schedule and over budget. A solution was needed.

In September 1987, SEI published a brief overview of software development processes, describing different levels of maturity. It also included a questionnaire designed to identify areas within an organization that needed improvement.

However, most companies treated the questionnaire as a complete model in its own right. As a result, four years later, the questionnaire was transformed into a formal model called the Capability Maturity Model for Software (CMM). The first version of CMM (Version 1.0) was released in 1991.

By 2002, guidelines for improving software development processes had evolved into what became known as CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration). The latest version at the time of writing was CMMI 1.3, published in November 2010.