What Is Process Maturity, Why Does It Matter and How Do You Improve It?

Learn how to use a process maturity model to drive alignment, prioritize investments, and set achievable goals. Whether you’re just starting or looking to move from good to great, we offer a practical road map for business leaders and process improvement teams.

In brief:

• Process maturity is your road map to consistency and scale. It measures how well you define, manage and continuously improve your business processes.
• Organizations typically don’t invest in process maturity unless they’re hitting a pain threshold with manual processes or can’t meet growth goals without scalable, repeatable systems.
• Six dimensions determine your maturity level. Process knowledge, ownership, effectiveness, and performance metrics, along with organizational enablement and technology enablement, must all advance together. You’re only as strong as your weakest dimension.

When processes across your company work together to achieve unfailing efficiency and effectiveness and drive business value, you’re creating optimal process performance. But figuring out what you need to do to reach, sustain, and refine that goal may seem so daunting that you don’t know where to start. And many companies that do start don’t reach their intended destinations: An estimated 70 percent of all business process transformations fail.

That track record notwithstanding, process maturity is the necessary and accessible means to that end goal because it provides detailed guidance to produce:

• Consistently repeatable, high-quality results among all teams and locations
• Reductions in waste, rework, and delays
• Standardized, managed processes that scale more effectively as the business grows
• Stable governance that supports risk management, compliance and accountability

In effect, it’s a navigation chart that reflects “how many of your business processes you’ve defined, managed, measured, controlled, and continuously improved across the enterprise,” explains Jack Johnston, business process improvement lead with Centric Consulting’s business consulting services.

Process maturity indicates how well a company understands and governs its processes and the extent to which it realizes their full potential.

When you align your broader end-to-end processes with your strategic goals in this way, you can find new opportunities for specific, positive process changes and foster innovation. Then, you can begin a focused business evolution built on a culture of ongoing process excellence.

Evaluating your company’s process maturity is a superb place to begin that journey. It’s also an imperative.

Embarking on Your Change Journey Through Process Maturity

Organizations need to develop a clear understanding of their readiness for a commitment to process excellence. So, how can they tell if they are ready for this?

“People and organizations tend to resist change unless there is a compelling reason to do so,” Johnston says. “That is, typically, there needs to be an impetus, like crossing a threshold of pain caused by manual processes that are inefficient and error-prone, or being unable to meet growth goals without creating repeatable, scalable processes. Even if there is a compelling business reason, the leadership team members must agree about the need, and there must be enough organizational bandwidth to absorb the change.”

Consider the following questions to determine how ready you are:

• What change have you already attempted, and how successful or problematic were those efforts?
• What organizations, people, technologies, controls, and performance measures do your business process operations include?
• How can process owners and users understand and improve those processes and supporting structures?
• Are your C-level executives interested in processes, and do they prioritize them?
• Do your business processes perform at a high level?
• Are you interested in implementing any new processes or redesigning any outdated ones?
• What are the timeline and blueprint for this project: The kickoff? The next steps? The finish line?

After answering these questions, you need to take a step that can tell you if and how you’re ready to move forward. That’s where process maturity comes into play. It builds the internal capabilities from which process excellence — and individual process improvement initiatives — can follow.

Note, however, that process maturity, while complementary to process excellence and improvement, is separate and distinct from, and shouldn’t be confused with, those activities.

The 6 Dimensions of Our Process Maturity Model

When working with clients, we employ a customized process maturity model that we developed. It’s structurally based on the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) model but contains assessment criteria with six dimensions:

1. Process Knowledge

How much do people know and understand about processes?

2. Process Ownership

Who is responsible for implementing and managing processes?

3. Process Effectiveness

How effectively do the processes perform?

4. Process Performance Metric Alignment

What key performance indicators (KPIs) measure process success, and how and where do they track performance?

5. Technology Enablement

To what extent do you use advanced technologies to document, support, and refine processes?

As part of this assessment, team members should evaluate whether a technology solution can help fill an identified process maturity gap. Ideally, your company would use components within its existing technology stack and ensure that effort doesn’t create a debt or a gap elsewhere.

6. Organization Enablement

To what extent does your organization support and enhance process performance?

“A lack of leadership alignment, resistance to change, and a culture that doesn’t support continuous improvement are the three biggest challenges,” Johnston says.

Moreover, changes in leadership — whether at the C-suite or line level — risk derailing a process maturity effort. This leads us to a broader discussion of what interferes with organizational readiness to attain process maturity.

A Closer Look at Why Organizations Aren’t Ready

Organizations often face issues with the sixth dimension, organization enablement, and this holds them back from achieving process maturity.

Where leaders may be lacking is:

• Their insufficient investment in the necessary personnel, time, technology, and financial resources
• The inconsistent messages they send about process maturity initiatives
• Their failure to understand the benefits and strategic importance of process maturity

The resistance to change may stem from employee fears of how process change will impact their jobs: Will they lose their jobs or fall out of their operational comfort zones if they’re required to alter behaviors and adapt to new ways of doing things? This fear is present even if they’re made aware of the long-range benefits of the transformation.

Fear of failure is a big factor here. People who lack confidence in their ability to adapt and feel threatened by real or imagined shortcomings in this regard may think they can avert failure by resisting the change.

Effectively addressing cultural misalignment starts with a mindset change that recognizes that organizational enablement isn’t a one-time project. Rather, you must develop a culture of continuous improvement to sustain long-term success. Sometimes, before you can implement that culture, and accept new processes, leadership, team structures, and technologies, you have to uproot deeply ingrained, existing company culture and norms.

You might encounter other roadblocks on the way to process maturity in the organizational enablement dimension, including:

• Poor management and execution of the process maturity project
• Unstandardized performance metrics that produce inconsistent data for evaluating and improving enablement efforts
• Limited budgets for tools, training and support
• Not enough skilled personnel or dedicated process maturity teams to go forward
• Complexity-related problems when trying to integrate new technologies and solutions with existing systems

Now that we’ve covered the six dimensions in our process maturity model, let’s discuss the five-stage progress path that moves your company toward process excellence.

Process Maturity Variables, Including Competencies and Time Frames

Centric works with our clients to assess and determine where they stand within each of the six dimensions along a five-stage progress path. Then, we develop a plan and a road map to get them to the next level. The model becomes a catalyst to move your company along the process excellence curve.

The five stages of process maturity: minimal process focus, process aware, cross-functional process management, goal-driven process, and optimized process.

Not all structural competencies will be at the same level of maturity. By evaluating your organization’s process maturity, we can help you identify strengths and gaps.

Companies with shortcomings, such as a lack of documented processes, would need to address their lagging competencies first before (or while) introducing process changes. Failing to do this before you implement the technology needed to climb the process maturity scale often leads to failure and wasted resources.

We can apply this process maturity model at any level of your organization: single process, division, or entire company. It can also be applied at the department level, but it will generally result in a high number of level 1 and 2 ratings since this level is typically not cross-functional.

Remember, however, that these improvements take time.

“There are lots of variables, but for many Fortune 500 companies, it can take 18 to 24 months to move up one stage across all six dimensions,” Johnston cautions.

One such variable is how much time process maturity team members can take away from their regular job responsibilities to be available for this undertaking. It used to be common for companies to assign dedicated teams to process maturity — that was their sole responsibility for 12 to 18 months until they were finished.

But that isn’t the case today. So, we conduct a constrained optimization exercise to help you get the most out of the time you spend on process maturity.

Play the Long Game: What Process Maturity Looks Like

“While this definitely is a long-term journey, we teach our clients how to fish, so to speak, and then once we have helped them set up the necessary infrastructure and governance, they can lead the effort internally,” Johnston says.

The bigger the company, the longer it can take to progress because there is more complexity and more leaders to be aligned with the project.

This type of stage evolution recognizes that companies are constrained by the lowest common denominator of the process maturity model. Since all six dimensions support one another, you have to bring them up to the same stage before moving on to a higher level.

For instance, if you’re at level 1 in the technology enablement dimension, and level 2 or 3 on process effectiveness, you can’t move process effectiveness two or three up before you bring technology enablement up to that same two or three level. You should level-set where it is along the maturity model before moving dimensions forward in tandem.

But what do the desired endpoints really mean? According to SmartSheet, you’ll know when you have attained full process maturity when it is:

• Defined: Process steps are clearly delineated, and inputs regularly yield the same outputs.
• Efficient: While the process requires a reasonable amount of effort, miscommunications and process delays are rare.
• Documented: The process is clearly detailed, and employees know where to get all relevant information.
• Automated: All eligible process steps have been automated.
• Effective: The process reliably produces the expected results.

A company has a high level of process maturity when it displays the following characteristics:

• Standardized: Processes are consistent across teams.
• Measured: Process maturity is tracked through consistent metrics, such as KPIs.
• Analyzed: Processes are regularly evaluated for their efficiency and effectiveness.
• Continuously Improving: Teams adapt processes in tandem with company growth. Outcomes keep improving.

Now that we know what process maturity actually looks like, let’s explore who it benefits the most.

It’s Not Just Why You Assess Project Maturity, But for Whom

We’ve covered everything you’d want to know about why and how to conduct a process maturity assessment and how to gauge its success. But don’t lose sight of who process maturity benefits.

Ultimately, the high-quality products and services that result from increasing process maturity will please your customers. When mature processes work the way they’re supposed to, teams can reliably conform to customer specifications.

Also, by improving processes in this way, your business can increase your customer loyalty, referrals, and repeat business, while growing its competitive advantage and market share. You can use customer feedback and data to further refine your processes and fit them to customer needs and preferences.

This kind of customer-focused approach to process maturity will more closely align your processes to customer requirements and improve customer satisfaction.

Thinking Big, Starting Small, and Acting Quickly

By understanding your company’s process maturity in this way, your leaders and owners can determine the best approach to initiate process excellence efforts. Using the process maturity model as your first step will allow you to think big, start small, and act quickly. It will help you define where you are today and what it will take to achieve your long- and short-term process excellence goals.

If you create an overarching vision (think big), take careful, modest steps (start small), and put changes in place without delay (act quickly), your company will establish the optimal balance between strategic planning and practical execution that can take it to its process maturity destination.

Our Operational Excellence team works to create scalable, flexible solutions centered on your business needs. Interested in working together to improve your processes? Let’s Talk