Building and rolling out a maturity program

Product

Standardization

Engineering leadership

OpsLevel

July 13, 2023

The focus on speed to market often prioritizes feature development to capture and delight more customers—making it easy to fall into the trap of accumulating technical debt. OpsLevel’s approach to service maturity helps you proactively keep your product secure and functional as your engineering org changes and scales. It gives developers a solid foundation from which to maintain and improve services, while giving leaders an idea of where to focus resources.

Here, we’ll explain OpsLevel’s approach to service maturity and offer tips on how to implement or improve your existing service maturity process.

OpsLevel’s approach to service maturity

We define service maturity as any work that doesn’t entail building customer-facing features that focuses on service health and production readiness. Our approach to service maturity balances flexibility and consistency. Whether you’re looking to set global standards, or requirements unique to your team, a specific category, and beyond, you can build an impactful program with our campaigns, checks, rubric, and scorecards.

Service maturity prerequisites

To make the most of our maturity features, it’s important you have clear standards and unified ideas about what your maturity program entails. Asking the following questions help you get on the same page to make your pitch to leadership:

Why/when will the team prioritize maturity work?
Where does this work come from today?
What other stakeholders need to be involved?

Now you’re ready to tackle some of the prerequisites that get the foundations of your maturity program into place so it’s successful, entailing buy-in, defined service ownership, and clear processes:

Executive buy-in: You and your service owners will need time and resources to work on maturity initiatives, meaning leadership will need to see the ROI. The good news is that this work feeds into your bottom line (more uptime, better security) along with quarterly KPIs and metrics reporting to surface where there is room for improvement. Pro tip: If this part of the process is slowing you down, your team can get started with Scorecards to jumpstart service maturity without impacting org-wide standards.
Defined service ownership: An updated service catalog with clear service owners is vital to ensure accountability for services that need to be improved or updated. This is OpsLevel’s bread and butter, so make sure your catalog is up to date.
Build it into your processes: Wanting to make service maturity a priority doesn’t mean the work magically starts happening. Below we outline ways to do so.

Strategies to implement a service maturity program

Our customers across different industries and team sizes generally use one or a few of the following strategies to help their eng org adopt a service maturity program successfully.

Tie service maturity to goals and KPIs

Many customers integrate service maturity by making it a cornerstone of their quarterly planning cycles, while using OpsLevel to monitor metrics in recurring meetings. Setting specific goals and tying certain key performance indicators (KPIs) to service levels motivates teams to prioritize service maturity. Leadership can leverage reporting to identify lagging services and failing checks, enabling them to focus on necessary improvements.

OpsLevel reporting features that can help you do this:

Custom reports by: check/category, service/service-owner/team
In-depth ETL reports

Set aside dedicated time for service maturity work

Some customers incorporate service maturity work directly into their sprint cycles, ensuring that it becomes an integral part of the development process. They also assign a dedicated "maturity PM," technical program manager, or embedded SRE who takes charge of prioritizing and scoping the functional requirements, creating stories or tasks, and following up to ensure completion.

OpsLevel features that can help you do this:

Campaigns or delayed checks
JIRA integration

Gate deploys until services meet requirements

While not the most common, this strategy can be suited for complex or large organizations that already have a robust service catalog and service ownership structure. It involves implementing a rigorous top-down approach where services must meet certain requirements or achieve the highest service maturity levels before deployment to production. This alignment around service maturity rubrics prioritizes compliance.

OpsLevel features that can help you do this:

Set scoped standards to jumpstart your team’s maturity work

In OpsLevel, the Rubric is your org-wide report card that all teams, cross-functional groups, and services must adhere to. If you’re looking for a quick win, or part of a product development team that wants to get started with your own set of standards, you can start with Scorecards instead. Scorecards consist of a set of checks that are measured just like they would be on the Rubric, but aren’t visible org-wide, giving you an impactful but low-lift jumpstart on maturity work.

OpsLevel features that can help you do this:

Scorecards

How to prioritize and advance service maturity work into your processes

In thinking about a maturity program, it’s worth going through the lifecycle of check, as our most successful customers have a process in place and a clearly defined owner for each stage:

Identification: Identify and scope the requirements relevant to the teams and services involved.
Prioritization: Prioritize the identified requirements based on their importance and urgency compared to other ongoing work.
Configuration: Write the identified checks into OpsLevel, taking into account various factors such as check types, data sources, categories, and the appropriate level where the check should be applied. Build and test the check to ensure it functions correctly.
Communication: Communicate the new or pending requirements to the service owners, so they’re aware of the goals and deadlines associated with this work. Assign the necessary tasks through tools like Jira or Slack. This can also involve adding the check(s) to a team's backlog or sprint directly.
Verification: Someone should be in charge of the progress of the initiative and reporting back to teams or services that may be falling behind to ensure you’re hitting goals and deadlines.

You’re ready to implement service maturity… now what?

This article is focused on helping you develop a service maturity program for your org and start prioritizing the work. Once you have executive and team buy-in to implement your strategy, you can use OpsLevel to set the standard for service owners to work towards. First, you’ll set up your rubric (or scorecards) by adding checks across bronze, silver, and gold levels. Then you can use campaigns to give teams a deadline to get their services up to the right level and communicate about how and why to do so. Our other guides will help you learn best practices for using them as you get started.