Every successful business knows that growth is crucial for survival in today's ever-changing landscape. But before they can grow, companies need to have a strong baseline of maturity within their processes. Process Maturity is a term we use at Brewster Consulting Group to describe a company’s level of sophistication and the effectiveness of its processes. We created a Process Maturity framework that measures not only how efficient you are today, but also how efficient you will be as the business evolves. 

In a broader sense, an organization is a sum of all the individual processes that exist. If you want to drive a meaningful impact for your organization, you have to understand which processes are the biggest levers you can pull to drive improvement. That’s why it’s so important to spend time focused at the process level to drive real organizational impact. This includes understanding organizational goals and objectives, distilling them into the most influential processes, and evaluating the maturity levels of key processes.

 In this article, we will discuss process maturity in detail, including its definition and importance, and walk readers through the eight steps scale for evaluating and rating process maturity. 

What is Process Maturity?

Processes are the lifeblood of an organization; well-run processes stack upon one another to create the building blocks of an organization's operational success. As these processes mature, the organization grows in its quality and capabilities. Thus, we created a proprietary framework to facilitate the maturation of an organization’s processes. Process maturity is the degree to which an organization's processes are defined, measured, repeatable, and can be continuously improved. Process maturity can be viewed as a measure of the organization's ability to effectively manage and optimize its processes. The higher the level of process maturity, the more efficient and effective the organization's operations are likely to be, and the more capabilities the business will be able to handle.

Eight Steps For Evaluating and Rating Process Maturity

The Process Maturity framework is an 8-point scale, each level of the process maturity scale incorporates different deliverables to advance to the next level. The performance of an organization, at a macro level, is the sum of the individual processes. Process maturity helps distill organizational strategy and objectives down to tactical steps to drive improvement in performance. It also helps align and prioritize disparte initiatives across the organization to maximize positive impact. 

Definition
At the first level, organizations have ad-hoc processes in place that are not formally documented or standardized. Employees are left to figure out how to do their jobs on their own, which can lead to inconsistencies and errors. Questions, doubts, and guesses abound in an unformalized system, meaning that valuable time and resources can disappear on a daily basis. Accountability is hard to define because projects, without any true process owners, are managed by individuals using personal knowledge. Worse still, your clients can feel the results of such a crude operating system when their results are less than satisfactory. 

Ownership
In the second step, a process owner must be clearly established. The organization is still seeking consistent operating processes. These processes are starting to become documented and standardized, but they are not yet fully implemented or consistently followed. Employees may deviate from the standard procedures, leading to variability in the outcomes. For instance, a project team may have a set of procedures in place for creating, editing, finalizing, and delivering content to their client. With multiple hands on the team, an efficient process would be to have all the data stored in a shared space or drive, like the cloud, so that it’s accessible to anyone on the team at any time. If a collaborative effort relied on local storage, or if some of the members housed data on their personal devices, version control would suffer and could lead to an incomplete final product. 

Understanding
In the third phase, the organization has clearly defined their processes while completing their process map. The team as a whole now has a firm grasp on what is expected of them and how they ought to deliver the results. Furthermore, subject matter experts are identified, defining a hierarchy when a helping hand or expert opinion is necessary. 

Standardization
Businesses can graduate to the fourth stage of process maturity once they begin to standardize their clearly defined processes. This phase takes planning and coordination to execution when procedures exist to standardize necessary components. Cross functional process impacts are mapped, ensuring that each team and department understands how they are affected. Finally, the organization will have reached standardization once they have proper change control in place. The goal is to create a smooth and efficient transition from stage to stage, and from team to team, with standardized practices. 

Measurement and Defect Reduction
Consistent measurement and defect reduction is the next phase of process maturity. As your team moves along the maturity scale, KPIs, SLAs, and SLOs are established to monitor and track organizational efficiency. It’s critical for organizations to be able to both identify and successfully catalog risks and controls by this stage. Process data management is now aligned with organizational data strategy, further propelling the organizations towards an optimized operating environment. 

Automation
Automation is one of the most important stages in the growth of an organization. Upon reaching the automation phase, manual process tasks are increasingly replaced by automated execution. These processes are now reaching goals as defined by key metrics, while stretch goals for those key metrics are developed in alignment with bigger objectives. Organizations can establish a Comprehensive Process Reporting system that is focused on identifying and addressing process inefficiencies and bottlenecks to continue driving the business forward. 

Innovation
As businesses reach the innovation stage, they’re growing closer towards complete process maturity. This penultimate stage is defined by an increase in analytics and new thought. The team is encouraged to constantly evaluate and optimize their processes for continued improvement, always leveraging data to find the best solution. One example is using predictive analytics to drive process insights and ensure maximum efficiency. 

Scalability and Digital Transformation
Upon reaching the final stage of process maturity, organizations are continuously improving by weeding out faulty systems and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible through predictive and prescriptive analytics. All of these factors, working hand in hand, allow an organization to scale as rapidly as their sales engine allows. Teams predict, adapt, execute on repeat. 

Benefits of Process Maturity

As your business progresses through the process maturity scale, businesses can reap a number of benefits. 

Increased Efficiency
Improving efficiency is a major benefit of process maturity. By streamlining and standardizing processes, businesses can reduce waste, eliminate redundancies, and optimize their use of resources. This can lead to cost savings, increased productivity, and improved quality.

Consistency
By establishing a framework and baseline for processes, businesses can ensure consistency across all operations. This can lead to higher quality products and services, as well as improved customer satisfaction. A company that provides IT support may ensure that all support staff follow the same procedures when handling customer inquiries, ensuring a consistent level of service for all customers.

Scalability and Agility
By creating a scalable framework and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, businesses can become more agile and better able to adapt to changes in the market. Online retail services may be able to quickly add new products to their website or adjust their pricing strategies in response to changes in customer demand.

Better Decision-Making
By automating processes and using data analytics tools, businesses can make better-informed decisions. This can lead to improved outcomes and increased profitability. For example, a company that provides financial services may use data analytics tools to identify patterns in customer spending behavior, allowing them to make better-informed investment recommendations.

Taking the Next Step

Now that you understand what process maturity is, what are you supposed to do about it? Knowing how to implement the right process map can be tricky or time consuming. That’s where Brewster Consulting Group takes the baton. 

Reach out to us and set up a consultation where we can walk you through our process and discuss how we can increase your team’s collaboration, productivity, innovation, and revenue growth through increased process maturity.