Whats the difference between Staged and Continuous?
It’s just different ways of looking at the same data… The main difference is simply how the model is organized around the path towards process improvement that an organization can take. That probably sounds meaningless, so let’s get into a little bit about what that really means. The SEI, based on the original idea behind the CMM for Software, promoted the notion that there are more basic and more advanced (key)* process areas that organizations should endeavor to get good at on the way to being highly mature, highly capable organizations. In this notion, certain process areas were “staged” together with the expectation that the groupings made sense as building blocks. Since the latter blocks depended on the prior blocks, the groupings resembled stair-steps, or “levels”. The idea then was that the first level didn’t include any process areas, and that the first staging of (K)PAs* (the actual “level 2”) was a set of very fundamental practices that alone could make a significant differ
