Since the initial Crosby's idea in 1979, plenty of Maturity Models (MM) have been created and applied in several application domains, most of them being in the Software and Systems Engineering domains. After analyzing those models deeply, moving from their Process Reference Models (PRM), it is possible to observe an orthogonality between horizontal and vertical MM. This article proposes a way to combine different MM from both "directions" with the aim of improving its Quality Management System (QMS) and achieving higher capability levels within a process improvement path, in this case from a Project Management perspective.

One of the new ISO standards widely spread during the last few years is the ISO/IEC 20000-1 standard about Service Management, promoting "an integrated process approach to effectively deliver managed services to meet the business and customer requirement", assuming that "the execution of the provisions of […] ISO 20000 is entrusted to appropriately qualified and competent people". Very quickly ISO 20000 has been considered to be an ideal companion of ISO 9001 requirements not only because it deals specifically with service management, but also because of its clear and well-expressed intention of being an integrated process management system to meet the business requirement within an organization. Again in the new ISO 9001:2008 a note was introduced in clause 8.2, mentioning the need to take into account the aspect of "lost business analysis" for a proper monitoring of customer satisfaction. This clause was previously not present.

Thus the question is: How to deal with all these models/standards at the same time and properly manage such issues in the organization's Business Process Model (BPM, to be meant as the whole series of processes run within an organization, not only those ones under the Quality Management System umbrella, which is a subset). There are two alternatives possible. One is to manage these issues separately with separated audits/appraisals from more teams and then reconciliate the results for the writing of a process improvement plan. The second way is to "steal" and use the best practices from plenty of specific models in order to reinforce the company's own BPM and then manage the improvement initiative moving from its own model. One must also consider the impact of the maturity level of the organization on the time, cost and the perception of the society.

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