3 Ways to Determine Department Maturity

Department Maturity

A department’s maturity is based on to what extent a department has processes and measurements in place for the following:

1. Department knows what they produce that provides value to the organization.
2. Department is held to some standards and procedures (Standards could be specific to company or based off of industry standards)
3. Department has measurements and makes changes to continual improve on these measurements.

To help us understand better understand departmental maturity, lets define business and department:

A business is an economic system in which goods and services are exchanged for one another or money, on the basis of their perceived worth. Every business requires some form of investment and a sufficient number of customers to whom its output can be sold at a profit on a consistent basis.

A business needs to manage the following effectively:

1. Money
2. Time
3. Resources (people)

A department is a specialized functional area within an organization or a division, such as accounting, marketing, planning. Generally every department has it own manager and chain of command.

Questions department leaders should ask themselves to determine maturity:

1. Does my department have a budget?
2. How am I measured against the budget?
3. What is it that my department produces that adds company value (revenue)?
4. Who are my customers? (Both internal and external)
5. What are my department inputs and outputs?
6. How is my department’s success measured?
7. Do I have business processes in place for repeatable actions?

From the above questions, what questions can I not answer and why?

Other department maturity questions to ask:

What work does the department do daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly that provides value (revenue) and how do we measure it? What are my daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly department inputs and outputs? What repeatable processes we do daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly?

Inputs

What type of inputs comes into my department?

• Requests
• One off requests
• Requests that turn into projects
• Repeatable work
• Projects

Outputs

What are the outputs from my department?
• Company assets
• Reports
- Who are my stakeholders?

Measurements

How is my department measured?