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Position · Diagnose, Plan

Capability maturity assessment

Rates how well a business actually does something, on a scale rather than a yes/no. The honest answer for most capabilities is lower than the leadership team expects, and that gap is the finding.

The printable canvas and the handoff into Claude Code are part of a paid plan. See what a plan includes. It needs the Claude desktop app on this machine, and your team and the prompt library already installed in that project — we cannot see your disk, so open it there.

Stage
01 Diagnose, 04 Plan
Works at
Business, Department
Maturity
Established SME → Large organisation
Time
Two to three weeks for a proper assessment

What it is

An assessment of how consistently and deliberately an organisation performs a given capability, scored against defined levels rather than a binary can/cannot. Derived from the Capability Maturity Model, its value is that it distinguishes between doing something once and being able to do it reliably.

Level 1 — Initial
It happens, but ad hoc and dependent on individuals. Outcomes vary widely and success is not repeatable.
Level 2 — Managed
There is a process and it is followed on important work, but it is reactive and quality still varies by who is doing it.
Level 3 — Defined
A standard approach exists, is documented, and is used across the organisation. Outcomes are broadly predictable.
Level 4 — Measured
The process is instrumented. You know how well it performs and can detect when it degrades.
Level 5 — Optimising
The organisation improves the process deliberately and continuously, using its own measurement to do so.
Target level
What this capability actually needs to be. Most need three; the one or two that differentiate you need four or five. Nothing needs five by default.
The mistake people makeEveryone scores themselves a level higher than the evidence supports, and the fix is to score against what happened rather than how things are supposed to work. Also resist assessing everything — a twenty-capability heat map is a document, not a decision.
What it’s forYou need an honest read on whether the organisation can do the thing before you commit to it.
What it’s not forSpeed matters more than rigour. These take a while and the answer is usually "not yet".

How you run it

  1. Only assess what the strategy needsAssessing everything produces a heat map nobody acts on. Start from the strategy and work back to the four or five capabilities it depends on.
  2. Define what each level looks likeWrite the descriptors before you score anything. Without them, scoring becomes a vote on how people feel about their own department.
  3. Score on evidence, not self-assessmentAsk what happened last time, not how things generally work. Self-assessed maturity runs about a level and a half high.
  4. Set the target deliberately below the topLevel five in everything is neither achievable nor sensible. Most capabilities only need to be adequate; one or two need to be excellent.
  5. Cost the movementOne level of maturity is typically twelve to eighteen months of sustained attention. If the plan needs three levels in a year, the plan is the problem.

The prompt

Two ways to run it

Run this tool in your own Claude

The short prompt starts your partner against the library on your disk. The long one carries everything with it and needs nothing installed.

🔒 Prompt locked

Everything above is free — what this tool is, what it is for, what it is not for, and how to run it as a workshop. Three tool prompts a month are free with an account; beyond three, and for the printable canvas, it is the paid part.

See plans — from £19 a month

Your playbook

It lands in the earliest stage this tool suits. Move it on the Playbook page.

You’ll need

  • The capabilities that the strategy depends on
  • Access to the people who do the work
  • A tolerance for an unflattering result

You’ll end up with

  • A current maturity level per capability, evidenced
  • A target level, with a reason for it
  • The cost and time to move each one

Runs well with

AI operating model optionsAI risk classification and governanceAlliance and partnership designAnalysis plan