The goals of the revenue assurance maturity program were as follows:
- Provide a simple standard questionnaire that a revenue assurance manager, internal audit manager or similar can complete in less than 90 minutes purely from their existing knowledge of the business;
- Avoid quantitative measures of performance that may not be readily available or which prejudge priorities in each business;
- Present a simple scoring mechanism that will assist the brief presentation of results to executives and which will enable benchmarking between service providers; and
- Ensure the technique can be equally well applied to all types of electronic communications service provider, no matter what kind of business model, what customers it serves, the size of the business, its geographical markets, the technologies employed or any other factor.
The following principles were adopted to aid development of the maturity model:
- Assess the business as a whole, not just the department or people responsible for revenue assurance;
- State a model of growth that treats silo management of revenue assurance as a transitional stage but not as its ideal and ultimate conclusion;
- Address all relevant aspects of business performance and not just those currently in the scope of work or given management attention;
- Give a strategic roadmap that is simple but which clarifies what the next series of ambitions should be for the business;
- Borrow from the staged representation used in the Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model Integration;
- Adopt a Deming-like model of continuous improvement, where performance follows a pattern of being increasingly repeatable, then measurable, and then predictable.
