Ops Maturity: The Difference Between Momentum and Mess.
Ops Maturity and Why It Matters
Let me say the quiet part out loud: Ops is usually the last thing anyone pays attention to - until it breaks.
I’ve spent years watching this play out. The strategy lands, the targets get set, the budget is signed off. And ops? Ops are left out of the room, until the cracks show.
The Project That Stuck with Me
There’s one project I’ll never forget. It was meant to be the big fix - the initiative that finally removed the operational pain from our systems to free up capacity. Sounds great, right? The promise to senior leadership was enormous too: headcount savings and major service delivery improvements. Well then - let’s go.
But the Ops team weren’t consulted in enough depth to qualify any of the project outcomes.
What followed was three years of aspiration layered on top of shaky reality. Systems were designed for the business model that leaders wished they had, and the gap between wish and reality was too great. The manual workarounds, the reliance on tacit knowledge, the sheer hours poured into “pushing the change through”, none of it was acknowledged, and certainly not included in the project updates to leadership.
The result? A bigger gap, mounting frustration about Ops efficiency, and thousands sunk into development costs - all while the same question echoed: “Why aren’t we there yet?”
As the gap widened, my own frustration grew. As a director tasked with deploying this change into my regional teams I was inevitably failing too. I was asked why my team was so resistant, so unwilling to adopt a new system.
So, I put together a review of the project. I compared the benefits promised at the start with the reality we were facing. The truth was stark: our original targets had been missed long ago; the scope never touched the real pain points and didn’t keep up with creep and the supposed benefits were never actually achievable. Yet the project rolled on with no gateway decisions… just more spend.
Ops resistance was branded as the brake pedal when in reality, it was the only thing keeping the car from skidding off the road.
That experience crystallised something for me: maturity matters. Not as a buzzword, but as the difference between building momentum and building resentment.
What I Mean by Ops Maturity
When I talk about maturity, I don’t mean endless processes, or red tape that slows everything down. And I don’t mean the tenure or skillset of the team - which is often the red herring.
True Ops maturity is about whether a business has the foundation to carry its ambition.
It looks like this:
Clarity in how and why things get done.
Consistency and transparency in delivery.
Trust in the business data.
Adaptability without burning people out.
Without it, the symptoms are obvious:
Problems repeat like a bad song on loop.
Teams get drawn back to firefighting mode.
Decisions stall because no one understands the risks.
Growth feels harder than it should.
This isn’t abstract. I’d always succeeded in my career by pulling together data and stripping out the emotion of a situation so decisions could be made with clarity. I was inspired to make the invisible visible - including the risks and the human cost of ignoring them.
Why It Matters Now
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the cracks are there whether you want to look at them or not.
Business doesn’t move in predictable cycles anymore. Growth expectations are bigger, change is constant, and complexity is higher. Add to the mix that AI is knocking at the door whether you’re ready or not and everyone is screaming at you about innovation.
In that environment, shaky ops foundations don’t just slow you down, they put you at risk.
If your processes already buckle under pressure, scale will crush them.
If you ignore the load on your people, you’ll lose the very capacity you need to move forward.
If you can’t trust your data, you can’t make sound decisions let alone deploy AI or automation responsibly.
And yet, many leaders still shy away from looking at operations. Why? Because it feels messy. Because it feels expensive. Because it’s easier to focus on strategy decks and big ideas than on the day-to-day mechanics that make them real. But it’s exactly in those mechanics where businesses succeed or stumble
Ops maturity doesn’t solve everything. But without understanding it, everything else becomes harder and more frustrating than it needs to be
My Point of View
I don’t believe in perfect operations. Businesses are messy because people are messy. But I do believe in honesty about where the cracks are, and the cost of ignoring them.
That’s what maturity assessment offers: a clearer picture, and the ability to choose where to focus. Without it, you’re stuck treating symptoms instead of addressing the cause.
That’s why I created The Echo Reset™ - a maturity lens built from years of watching ambitious projects miss the mark, not through lack of intent or care, but because operational reality was never on the table. Too often, teams carried a hidden weight while leaders wondered why progress felt so hard.
For me, ops maturity is about resilience, clarity, and the confidence to face reality instead of papering over it.
And the good news? You can review this whenever you like, it moves with you as a breathing model. Imagine if we all did a health check on our operations as often as we sense-checked our P&L?