Under his leadership CISQ has begun releasing standards for measuring the size (Automated Function Point Counting) and structural quality characteristics of software at the code and software architecture level. Curtis initiated the project to create the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in 1991 after he had been selected to succeed Watts Humphrey as the Director of the Software Engineering Institute's Software Process Program. The CMM integrated the software development best practices the SEI had been collecting into Humphrey's Process Maturity Framework. The CMM for Software Version 1.0 was released in August, 1991 and Version 1.1 in January, 1993, and the CMM was published as a book in 1995. Throughout the 1990s he promoted the CMM to companies and government agencies in the U.S, E.U., and Asia, contributing to its global adoption as a method for guiding process improvement and for evaluating the capability of software organizations. Curtis recognized that Humphrey's Process Maturity Framework was a unique model of organizational development that challenged conventional wisdom on how to conduct organizational improvement programs and could be applied to organizational processes far beyond software development. With his background in organizational psychology, he proposed applying Humphrey's framework to human capital management practices. Working with Bill Hefley and Sally Miller, he created the People CMM, validating the broad applicability of the Process Maturity Framework to many different organizational processes. The People CMM stages the implementation of increasingly sophisticated human capital management practices across the five levels of organizational maturity proposed by Humphrey. The People CMM has been used by several Fortune 200 companies to guide workforce development programs, and has been widely adopted by offshore system integrators and outsourcers to help manage the rapid growth of their workforces. With support from Nedbank in South Africa, Dr. Curtis and Charles Weber developed a Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM) to extend the benefits of CMM and CMMI which are project-based, to the continuous value-chain processes of a business. The BPMM includes several new innovations in maturity models based on a decade of experience in applying them to guide process improvement programs. The BPMM has been applied and validated in the banking, electronic equipment manufacturing, medical services, and gaming industries. The BPMM has recently become a supported specification (standard) of the Object Management Group's Business Process Management Initiative. Curtis led a team at General Electric Space Division that was the first to prove experimentally that software metrics could be used to predict programmer performance and quality.