Three categories of factors that may influence your decision when selecting a representation are business, culture, and legacy.

An organization with mature knowledge of its own business objectives is likely to have a strong mapping of its processes to its business objectives. Such an organization may find the continuous representation useful to appraise its processes and in determining how well the organization’s processes support and meet its business objectives.

If an organization with a product-line focus decides to improve processes across the entire organization, it might be served best by the staged representation. The staged representation will help an organization select the critical processes to focus on for improvement.

The same organization may opt to improve processes by product line. In that case, it might select the continuous representation—and a different appraised rating of capability might be achieved for each product line. Both approaches are valid. The most important consideration is which business objectives you would like your process improvement program to support and how these business objectives align with the two representations.

Cultural factors to consider when selecting a representation have to do with an organization’s capability to deploy a process improvement program. For instance, an organization might select the continuous representation if the corporate culture is process based and experienced in process improvement or has a specific process that needs to be improved quickly. An organization that has little experience in process improvement may choose the staged representation, which provides additional guidance on the order in which changes should occur.

If an organization has experience with another model that has a staged representation, it may be wise to continue with the staged representation when using CMMI, especially if it has invested resources and deployed processes across the organization that are associated with a staged representation. The same is true for the continuous representation.