How to use the operational maturity model: assessing your efficiency

Companies looking to improve efficiency and reduce risks know the importance of organizational growth. Assessing your current processes using the operational maturity model and then taking actionable steps for continuous improvement is key to improvement. Whether you’re leading a development team or managing a large-scale platform, this framework will streamline your operations for the maximum impact.

The operational maturity model

The Operational Maturity Model (OMM) is basically a structured way to evaluate and improve your organization’s growth. It provides insights into standards like operational efficiency, risk management, and factors affecting your overall success.

As Gartner describes it, operational maturity is used to “assess maturity in people, process, technology and business management dimensions, creating a road map for systematic, prioritized improvement. This is used to track progress toward increased maturity and business value.” Meaning, maturity is not just about short-term efficiency gains—it’s about scaling systems that grow, adapt, and support your long-term business goals.

Here are some key takeaways:

• Operational Maturity Model (OMM) helps your organization look at their efficiency, identify risks, and use that information to guide continuous improvement.
• The benefits of measuring operational maturity help you improve efficiency, improve your risk management, and provide insights for decision-making, leading to better customer satisfaction.
• Key components of operational maturity include things like documented processes, increased automation, utilizing metrics, and developing a culture of continuous improvement.
• Levels of operational maturity range from “wild west” processes at the lowest level to fully optimized, automated systems at the highest level.
• You should measure operational maturity by conducting self-assessments, defining and tracking your key metrics, using scorecards, involving stakeholders, and optimizing automation.
• Use an internal developer portal to simplify the assessment process by offering built-in metrics, dashboards, and scorecards for tracking progress.
• Achieving operational maturity is a continuous process! Iteration is key to building better performance, scalability, and improved customer outcomes.

Levels of operational maturity

Operational maturity is typically broken down into five levels. These range from ad-hoc “wild west” processes to fully optimized systems that use continuous improvement and advanced technologies. Here is a summary of the five basic levels:

1. Initial/ad-hoc:

At this stage, operations are largely unstructured. Processes are reactive rather than proactive, and there’s not much documentation. Organizations rely heavily on individual expertise, which often leads to wasted time. Scaling is difficult because processes aren’t repeatable, making it hard to maintain consistency.

Key characteristics:

• Reactive processes
• High reliance on manual work
• Minimal documentation

2. Managed level

At this level, organizations start deciding it’s time to formalize processes and workflows. While improvements are made in consistency, there’s still a lack of widespread automation. Metrics may be tracked, but they aren’t being used for decision-making processes yet.

Key characteristics:

• Some documented processes
• Basic tracking of metrics
• More collaboration between teams

3. Defined level

Organizations at this level have established their processes and workflows. They benefit from more documentation and incorporate tools to track and manage operations.

Key characteristics:

• Well-documented processes
• Use of tools for performance tracking
• Early stages of automation

4. Quantitatively managed level

At this level, organizations use data to make decisions. Metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are central in performance assessments, and automated systems are commonly used to improve processes.

Key characteristics:

• Data-driven decision-making
• Widespread automation
• Continuous process improvement

5. Optimized level

Organizations at the optimized level have fully automated processes driven by data. They focus on innovation and scaling, often leveraging advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning to improve operations further.

Key characteristics:

• Fully automated processes
• Use of advanced technologies (AI, ML)
• Focus on innovation and scaling

Why you should measure operational maturity

Measuring your organization’s operational maturity comes with many benefits that help you scale while improving overall performance. Let’s check out some of the key advantages:

1. Improved efficiency

As organizations move through the stages of operational maturity, they’ll start refining their workflows and reducing bottlenecks. This organically leads to greater efficiency and then faster product delivery. In fact,  mature organizations turn to automation, which helps reduce repetitive tasks allowing teams to focus on more innovative work.

2. Risk mitigation

Operational maturity provides a strong framework for managing risk. Structuring around a maturity model means organizations can identify potential risks early and take care of them before they turn into major problems. Risks could be anything from compliance gaps to inefficiencies that disrupt daily processes.

3. Better decision-making

Knowing your organization’s maturity level means leaders can make smarter, data-driven decisions. This type of insight is valuable when it comes to things like resource allocation, process improvement, and tech investments. Getting a clear picture of where your organization stands makes it much easier to focus on the areas needing attention.

4. Scalability

Mature organizations are better able to scale their operations thanks to their clearly defined processes, established workflows, and team communication. Growing in your operational maturity creates an environment where people can thrive, free from the chaos of miscommunication and bad practices.

5. Increased customer satisfaction

Happy customers are the ultimate goal, and a mature organization delivers on this with stellar, dependable customer service. By ensuring operational stability, these organizations can better meet or even exceed their customer’s expectations. What’s the result? Customers that are happy, satisfied, and loyal. 

Key components of an operational maturity model

A solid operational maturity model considers several factors that give a clear picture of how well an organization is functioning. Here are some of the most important elements:

1. Process docs
   ‍Having clear and detailed documentation of your processes is a sign of a mature organization. It helps keep things consistent and scalable and makes onboarding new team members much easier. For example, using an internal developer portal to display and search this documentation helps create an environment of collaboration and learning.‍
   ‍
2. Automation
   ‍Mature organizations use automation to handle manual, repetitive tasks. By automating workflows and self-service actions, teams reduce errors, speed up processes, and free up time to focus on more valuable work. Plus, automation fosters better collaboration between development and operations teams, making handoffs smoother, as highlighted in the platform engineering maturity model.
   ‍‍
3. Metrics and KPIs
   ‍Tracking key metrics and other metrics is increasingly important for measuring how well your processes work. Mature organizations use metrics like deployment frequency, error rates, and system uptime to make data-driven decisions and ensure their operational efficiency.‍
   ‍
4. Governance and compliance
   ‍Strong governance means that your organization complies with regulations, industry standards, and internal policies. This helps you maintain security and efficiency even as the organization grows.‍
   ‍
5. Continuous Improvement
   ‍No matter the level of maturity, organizations should always have a goal of continuous improvement. Regularly evaluating your processes and systems to find areas for growth is key. Tools like portals can support this by offering performance scorecards and tracking improvements over time.

You can see how similar frameworks are applied in platform engineering maturity models by checking out our in-depth guide on using the platform engineering maturity model to understand the commitment required for an internal developer platform.

How to measure operational maturity

Measuring operational maturity requires a comprehensive approach. This includes self-assessment, audits, and analysis of key metrics.

Below are the steps involved:

1. Conduct a self-assessment

Start by conducting a self-assessment using a developer experience survey to gather data. Evaluate your current workflows, team collaboration, and tool usage. Organizations that have attempted to build an internal developer portal’s software catalog have often unearthed many issues with their existing set up, particularly when they begin relating elements together. For instance they may find clear issues with ownership of services, which impacts the responsibility for maintaining code , or they may identify that some repositories don’t have the capability for pull requests, meaning that anyone could alter the code. 

2. Define key metrics

Use your portal to track metrics like deployment frequency, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and system uptime. These KPIs will provide a baseline to assess your operational maturity level. By tracking progress over time, organizations can measure how they advance through the maturity model.

3. Use scorecards

Create scorecards using an internal developer portal for tracking progress on these targets across different teams and projects. These scorecards can be customized to align with your organization’s specific maturity goals. For example, you can set individual targets for each of the DORA metrics in a DORA metrics scorecard — if each of these metrics hits their targets and reaches the top tier, the scorecard shows that you are on track. To learn more about creating scorecards, explore the scorecards section of our practical guide to internal developer portals or look at our docs.

4. Involve stakeholders

Maturity assessments should involve input from all relevant teams. Use your portal to facilitate cross-team collaboration by providing each stakeholder with the metrics that matter to them in their own tailored dashboards, allowing for collective problem-solving and more comprehensive assessments of bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

5. Automate for optimization

Automation is crucial to reaching higher levels of operational maturity. An internal developer portal allows for automation across the entire development lifecycle—from code deployment to testing and monitoring—helping you reduce operational risks and scale more efficiently.  For instance, you can use self-service actions so that developers can use simplified forms to create resources, report a bug, or request access to a resource.  

Conclusion

As you’ve learned, analyzing your operational maturity is essential for an organization’s success. Understanding where your organization stands regarding operational efficiency helps you identify areas for improvement and then make decisions that drive better results.

No matter which stage you’re at—from the “wild west” to “fully optimized”—the journey to operational maturity is one you should take for continuous growth. Your organization can improve performance and grow more easily by using the right tools, metrics, and teamwork. This will then lead you down the road to your main goal of increased customer satisfaction.