Maturity Model Examples: 15 Areas of Business You Can Assess

When people hear "maturity model", many think of software engineering. The idea started there, but it works for almost any capability an organisation depends on. A maturity model simply describes how a practice develops, from informal and person-dependent to deliberate, consistent and continuously improving, and gives you concrete descriptions to compare yourself against.

This article walks through fifteen areas where a maturity assessment is genuinely useful. For each one you will find what the area covers, what low and high maturity look like in practice, and the kind of organisation that benefits most. If you want the basics first, our guide to what a maturity model is covers how they work and how to read the scores.

What makes a good maturity model example?

Before the list, it helps to know what separates a useful maturity model from a checklist with numbers attached. The best ones share three traits:

• Concrete descriptions. Each level describes observable behaviour ("risks are reviewed monthly by a named owner"), not adjectives ("risk management is robust").
• A sensible number of levels. Enough to show progression, few enough that people can tell them apart. We use three levels for every model, and our methodology explains why.
• Coverage of the whole capability. A good model looks at strategy, process, people and measurement, not just tools.

With that in mind, here are the examples.

Leadership and people

1. Change management

Change management maturity describes how well an organisation plans, delivers and sustains change. At the lowest level, changes are announced with little thought for how people will move from the old way to the new one, and success is declared when the project closes. At the highest level, change planning starts on day one of any initiative, sponsors are visibly active, resistance is treated as information, and adoption is measured long after go-live.

This is one of the most widely useful assessments because almost every organisation is running some kind of change. Try the Change Management assessment if you are about to start a major programme.

2. Leadership

A leadership maturity model looks at the individual leader: how they make decisions, develop others, deliver results and keep learning. It is most useful as a structured self-reflection or as the basis of a coaching conversation, rather than as a scoring exercise for a whole organisation.

3. Knowledge management

Knowledge management maturity asks whether what your organisation knows is captured, findable and reused, or whether it lives in a few people's heads. Low maturity shows up as repeated mistakes, slow onboarding and painful handovers when someone leaves.

Strategy and governance

4. Strategic planning

Strategic planning maturity covers how strategy is set, communicated and turned into action. A common pattern is a well-crafted strategy document that nobody outside the leadership team can summarise. Higher maturity means priorities are few, clearly linked to budgets and work, and revisited when circumstances change.

5. ESG and sustainability

ESG maturity describes how seriously environmental, social and governance factors are built into decisions. It ranges from compliance-driven reporting to genuine integration, where sustainability data shapes investment and product choices.

Operations and delivery

6. Business continuity

Business continuity maturity asks a simple question: if something major went wrong tomorrow, how quickly and calmly could you keep operating? Low maturity is a plan that has never been tested. High maturity is a tested, rehearsed capability with clear priorities agreed in advance.

7. Project and programme management

This model covers how projects are selected, governed and delivered. It is useful for organisations that run many projects at once and want to see whether failures come from poor planning, weak governance or the wrong projects being started in the first place.

8. Quality management

Quality management maturity moves from inspecting defects after the fact to preventing them by design, with root causes tracked and fixed systematically.

Technology and data

9. Cloud

Cloud maturity describes the journey from moving servers into a provider's data centre to building and running systems that genuinely take advantage of the cloud: automated environments, cost awareness and resilience by design. The Cloud Maturity assessment is a good starting point if your cloud bill is growing faster than the value you get from it.

10. Data management and analytics

Data maturity looks at whether data is trusted, owned and used to make decisions. A tell-tale sign of low maturity is meetings that spend the first half hour arguing about whose numbers are right.

11. AI readiness

AI readiness asks whether the foundations are in place to use AI well: clear use cases, good data, skills, and governance. It is less about which tools you have bought and more about whether you could put a model into production responsibly.

Risk, security and compliance

12. Risk management

Risk management maturity ranges from discovering risks when they turn into incidents to a forward-looking practice where risk information genuinely shapes decisions. The Risk Management assessment covers identification, assessment, treatment, monitoring, culture and governance.

13. Enterprise security

Security maturity describes how well an organisation protects itself, detects problems and recovers from incidents. The Enterprise Security assessment is a broad overview; more specialist models cover areas such as identity, cloud security and zero trust.

14. Privacy and data protection

Privacy maturity moves from policies that exist on paper to privacy built into how systems and processes are designed, with personal data collected only when needed and deleted when it is no longer required.

Customer and growth

15. Customer experience

Customer experience maturity describes how deliberately an organisation shapes the way customers feel at every interaction. At low maturity, the organisation responds to complaints. At high maturity, decisions are driven by customer insight and journeys are designed end to end. The Customer Experience assessment is useful whether you serve consumers, businesses or the public.

How to choose where to start

Fifteen areas is a lot, and assessing everything at once is rarely a good idea. A few practical rules:

1. Start with the area that hurts. If projects keep missing their benefits, start with change management or project management. If you have just had a security scare, start with security.
2. Start where a decision is coming. An assessment is most useful just before a budget round, a strategy refresh or a major investment.
3. Assess with more than one person. The value is often in the disagreements. If two leaders score the same area very differently, that conversation is worth more than either score.
4. Pick one or two areas, not ten. You can only act on a handful of improvements at once.

Frequently asked questions

Are maturity models only for large organisations?

No. Small organisations often benefit more, because a short assessment highlights the few practices that matter most without the overhead of a formal framework. The key is choosing a model written in plain language with concrete answers.

How long does a maturity assessment take?

A focused self-assessment of 24 to 28 questions usually takes 10 to 15 minutes per person. Running it as a team workshop takes an hour or two, including discussion.

What is the difference between a maturity model and a framework?

A framework tells you what good practice looks like. A maturity model describes stages of development, so you can see where you are on the path towards that good practice and what the next step is.

Where next

Every example above has a free assessment on this site, written from scratch with three plain-English maturity levels. Browse the full index of assessments, or start with the area that is causing you the most trouble today.