Perform a Self-Assessment
Once the company leadership has agreed on strategic investments and priorities to move the company forward, they begin to set goals around where they want to be a year to five years down the road.
A maturity model can be a very helpful framework for companies looking to assess and improve their capabilities in a specific area, moving them to that next target level. Each level of a maturity model represents a set of characteristics, practices, processes and outcomes the organization can strive to achieve.
Our goal with this document is to provide you with a roadmap of best practices and guidelines to help you develop your own maturity model for the processes where you need to identify areas of improvement and define a path towards higher levels of maturity and effectiveness.
At BillingPlatform, we have worked with many customers over several years to collect the data that has gone into these guidelines.
We have seen companies operate across 4 basic levels of maturity:
Ad-hoc
This is where companies usually begin, doing processes manually, often uncoordinated and not connected to the company strategy. They are just getting done the things that must be done the best way they know how, working in silos with no integration.
Structured
Companies will then begin to formalize processes and start to integrate efforts between silos. Most of the work they are doing is still manual, performed independently, but they may start using Excel or similar tools.
Coordinated
As they begin to look for efficiencies and productivity improvements, companies will start to invest in automation and systems to perform more complex processes. Those processes support a strategy that is becoming more clear and organizations are better aligned.
Optimized
Companies invest in dedicated systems that manage complex processes at a high level of execution. There is a strong focus on data-driven decision-making. Processes and systems align with corporate goals and are reviewed and improved.
In the next section, we will begin discussing the processes we feel are critical in supporting the CFO’s initiatives and the company strategy. For each of those processes, feel free to look at your own company and identify where you might fall in a maturity structure, as we have just outlined.