Readiness practice
Maturity assessment: judging how consistently something actually operates
Maturity grading exists to answer one question that a yes/no checklist cannot: is this practice a habit, or does it depend on a particular person remembering? Used well, it makes prioritisation defensible. Used badly, it becomes an argument about whether something is a two or a three.
Last updated 28 July 2026 · ISAREADY Editorial Team
Why a graded scale beats yes/no
Most honest answers to “do you do this?” are “partly”. A binary scale forces that answer into either a yes that overstates or a no that understates, and both distort the plan.
A graded scale also makes progress visible between passes. Moving a theme from partially implemented to implemented is real progress that a yes/no scale cannot record.
The scale we use
Our self-assessment uses four scoring levels plus an exclusion. The definitions matter more than the labels.
- Implemented — in place, operating across the whole scope, and you could produce a recent record without preparation.
- Partially implemented — real but uneven. Defined but not applied everywhere, or applied but not recorded.
- Planned — agreed and scheduled, not yet operating. Intention, correctly scored as almost nothing.
- Not implemented — not in place today.
- Not applicable — genuinely outside scope. Excluded from the calculation entirely rather than scored as zero.
ISAREADY recommendation This scale and its point values are ISAREADY methodology. They are not derived from, and are not comparable to, any official assessment scale.
Handling “not applicable” correctly
This is where most scoring models quietly go wrong. If a not-applicable answer scores zero, an organisation is penalised for scope it does not have. If it scores full marks, declaring things out of scope becomes a way to inflate the result.
The correct treatment is to remove it from both sides of the ratio: the earned points and the maximum applicable points. The score then describes only what actually applies.
The corollary is that not-applicable must be used honestly. It means “this genuinely does not exist in our organisation”, not “we would rather not answer”.
Keeping grading honest
Four habits that do most of the work:
- Write the level definitions down, with an example from your own organisation next to each.
- Grade in pairs — process owner plus someone from outside the area.
- Require a record reference for anything graded as fully implemented. If nobody can name the record, it is partial.
- Keep the previous pass visible during the re-assessment, and require a reason for every change in either direction.
What a maturity score is not
It is not a prediction. A high indicator means your practices look established and recordable to you; it says nothing about how a specific assessment against a specific catalogue will go.
It is also not a target in itself. The number exists to help you decide where to spend the next quarter. Once it starts being managed for its own sake, it stops being informative — which is the usual fate of any metric that becomes a goal.
Ready to see an indicative view? Take the free self-assessment.