Service Maturity Model
Introduce a service maturity model to help teams define their reliability journey
Objectives
The Service Maturity Model is one of the key tools that your organization can use to initially measure the health and direction of your services. It also helps business leaders to continually manage the services’ level, speed and quality.
Software reliability is a big deal, especially at the enterprise level, but too often companies are flying blind when it comes to the overall quality and reliability of their applications. It seems like every week, there’s a new report in the news calling out another massive software failure. Sometimes it’s just a glitch on social media causing usability issues, and other times it’s a serious issue in an aircraft system that leads to deadly crashes.
Clearly, not every software failure is fatal – engineers aren’t heart surgeons after all. However, a single error can impact more patients than a doctor could ever treat in their lifetime. That’s why maintaining application reliability (basically, making sure nothing breaks) is a top priority for every IT organization. And if it isn’t, it should be.
What is Continuous Reliability?
Continuous Reliability is the idea of balancing speed, complexity and quality by proactively and continuously working to ensure reliability throughout the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC). It is ultimately achieved by implementing data-driven quality gates and feedback loops that enable repeatable processes and reduce business risk.
To do this requires strong capabilities in both data collection and data analysis, meaning being able to access all relevant information about your application and then being able to use that data to proactively surface patterns and prevent software failures.
Achieving Continuous Reliability means not only introducing more data and automation into your workflow, but also building a culture of accountability within your organization. This includes making reliability a priority beyond the confines of operations roles, and enforcing deeper collaboration and sharing of data across different teams in the SDLC.
The Continuous Reliability Maturity Model
The Continuous Reliability Maturity Model is comprised of four levels that align with common patterns of obstacles and pitfalls organizations encounter on their reliability journeys. Below we break down the characteristics and challenges that define each level and provide recommended next steps that will help advance your progress.
“Site Reliability Engineers can use this framework to improve the reliability of their production services.”
The model has five maturity levels.
| Level 1 — Initial (Chaotic and driven mainly by Tribal Knowledge) |
| Level 2 — Repeatable (Still largely driven by Tribal Knowledge) |
| Level 3 — Defined (Standardized and Documented) |
| Level 4 — Managed (Capable and Controlled) |
| Level 5 — Optimizing (Let’s take it to the next level) |
PSNS Offer
PSNS offers to help you identify your Service level maturity using the Service Maturity Model.
