Levels are used in CMMI to describe an evolutionary path recommended for an organization that wants to improve the processes it uses to acquire capabilities, including products and services. Levels can also be the outcome of the rating activity in appraisals.[1] Appraisals can apply to entire companies or to smaller groups such as a small group of projects or a division in a company.

CMMI supports two improvement paths using levels. One path enables organizations to incrementally improve processes corresponding to an individual process area (or process areas) selected by the organization. The other path enables organizations to improve a set of related processes by incrementally addressing successive sets of process areas.

These two improvement paths are associated with the two types of levels, capability levels and maturity levels. These levels correspond to two approaches to process improvement called representations . The two representations are continuous and staged . The continuous representation has capability levels. The staged representation has maturity levels .

Regardless of which representation you select, the level concept is the same. Levels characterize improvement from an ill-defined state to a state that uses quantitative information to determine and manage improvements that are needed to meet an organization's business objectives.

To reach a particular level, an organization must satisfy all of the appropriate goals of the process area or set of process areas that are targeted for improvement, regardless of whether it is a capability or a maturity level.

Both representations provide ways to implement process improvement to achieve business objectives, and both provide the same essential content and use the same model components.