What Matters

Picked up this little nugget from Jeff on the Spolsky podcast: "what matters is what you deliver to the customer, and how happy the customer is with what you've delivered. There's many, many ways to get there."

That sentiment strikes me as very common and I know that several people used a variant of it to protest the entire concept of a maturity model. It also strikes me as overly simplistic and damaging to its adherents. The customer's happiness is temporal! What actually matters is the customer's happiness before, during and after a project. Delivery itself is not everything nor by itself the most important aspect of a project.

Once you start identifying practices that make your customer happy during the entire lifetime of a project, I think there's significantly less ways to "get there".