Adapting existing organizational maturity models to meet a company’s specific needs often requires balancing various costs. While tailored models provide clear roadmaps for improvement, altering standardized frameworks involves tradeoffs. This article examines key expenses business consultants should consider when modifying maturity models for clients.
Upfront Development Costs
Creating a customized maturity model requires initial investments of time and money. Consultants must research and analyze an organization’s unique goals, processes and culture to determine appropriate adaptations. This phase involves:
- Assessing current workflows, pain points and objectives
- Identifying industry best practices
- Selecting a relevant standard model as a baseline
- Interviews, surveys and workshops to collect input
- Compiling findings into a detailed comparison of the organization’s as-is and to-be states
While costly, upfront due diligence ensures the adapted model aligns to the company’s needs and provides actionable guidance. Streamlining data collection and limiting customization to critical elements helps control costs.
Ongoing Maintenance Fees
Unlike universal models that remain static, tailored frameworks need periodic updates to stay relevant amid changing business conditions. Potential maintenance expenses include:
- Monitoring industry trends and new best practices
- Regularly re-evaluating the organization’s priorities and processes
- Conducting refresh assessments to identify required model updates
- Adding new maturity levels or modifying existing ones
- Updating supporting materials like guidebooks and training programs
- Communicating changes across the organization
Proactively planning and budgeting for maintenance helps balance cost vs. value as strategies evolve.
Internal Rollout Expenses
Realizing a model’s benefits requires extensive internal adoption efforts. Companies must invest in:
- Executive alignment to secure buy-in
- Training programs for key staff directly using the model
- Broad organizational change management and communications plans
- Ongoing support resources such as help desks
- Integration with HR systems and performance management processes
- Progress tracking and reporting frameworks
While demanding, strong rollout strategies give the model staying power to transform operations long-term.
Opportunity Costs
Adapting models means diverting resources away from other initiatives. Assessing opportunity costs involves weighing:
- Loss of staff time spent on model customization vs. daily operations
- Deferred or cancelled projects due to reallocated budgets and personnel
- Comparative ROI of other proposed strategic investments
Keeping the end goal in mind helps justify opportunity costs of model adaptation to enable significant performance gains.
Risk of Over-Customization
Creating overly tailored models can reduce relevance over time as organizations and best practices evolve. Potential downsides of over-customization include:
- Highly specific frameworks become quickly outdated
- Excessive custom models provide less ability to benchmark against industry standards
- Heavily modified frameworks offer less flexibility for future changes
- Lost value from proven best practices in standardized models
- Increased long-term maintenance costs
Carefully balancing standardization with customization maximizes sustainability.
Reputational Costs of Failed Initiatives
If poorly executed, an adapted model’s unsuccessful roll-out can damage credibility. Setbacks can include:
- Perceptions of the initiative as unsuccessful if milestones are missed
- Damage to the sponsoring department’s image if targets aren’t achieved
- Consultants viewed as providing flawed guidance if the model fails to deliver promised benefits
Managing expectations and securing executive buy-in reduces reputational risks.
Lost Savings from Model Misuse
Organizations often underestimate costs when participants throughout the business misuse adapted models. Issues include:
- Inconsistent application leading to unreliable benchmarking data
- Unreliable progress measurement if assessments are misapplied
- Limited usefulness if staff don’t understand how to apply the model day-to-day
Investing in rigorous change management and training mitigates these risks.
Diminished Agility from Rigid Standards
While promoting consistency, overly prescriptive models can also constrain innovation. Potential drawbacks include:
- Processes becoming geared toward model demands rather than actual efficiencies
- Tendency to view maturity levels as ceilings rather than guidelines
- Resistance to changes perceived as deviating from the model
- Unwillingness to experiment with new approaches that could drive innovation
Flexibility to evolve the model ensures it augments, rather than hinders, performance.
The Cost of Not Evolving
While adapting models requires effort and investment, rigidly adhering to misaligned standards can be even more costly. The price of standing still includes:
- Missed opportunities to leverage industry best practices
- Failure to drive strategic priorities and desired cultural shifts
- Limited ability to address evolving customer and market expectations
- Falling behind competitors pursuing transformation
Adapting models, within budget constraints, provides a guided path toward growth.
In summary, adapting maturity models involves weighing tangible costs against harder-to-quantify benefits. With diligent planning, strong change management and sustained commitment, tailored models provide transformational frameworks for long-term success.
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Peter Drucker
