You Probably Already Know Your SOMM Level. Let's Confirm It.
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
You came away from the Service Operations Maturity Model, SOMM, with a hunch about where you land. The assessment turns that hunch into a number you can actually plan around.
If you read the Service Operations Maturity Model piece previously, something likely happened while you were reading it. You started placing yourself. Somewhere around Level 3, maybe. Or Level 2 on your worst weeks and Level 4 on your best ones.
That instinct is usually right. It is also usually fuzzy.
There is a difference between knowing you are roughly in the middle of the model and knowing exactly where you land and why. The first is a gut feeling. The second is something you can act on.
A range tells you how you feel about your operation. A level tells you what to do next.
That gap is the reason I built the self-assessment.
Why the number matters more than it sounds like it should
“We’re probably a Level 3” is a fine thing to say in a meeting. It is a useless thing to plan around.
Each level on the SOMM has its own work attached to it. The move from Activation to the Optimization Window is not the same as the move from Operational Maturity to Strategic Command; different problems, different priorities, different next steps. You cannot pick the right next step until you know which transition you are actually standing in front of.
A vague sense of maturity keeps you busy. A specific one makes you effective.
What each level actually tells you to do
This is the part that gets lost when the conversation stays at "we're somewhere in the middle." The level is not a grade. It is an instruction.
Level 1, The Foundation Stage. You are running services on spreadsheets, Smartsheets, and a set of tools held together by a few people who have other jobs. The telling sign is rarely collapse. It is inefficiency that has been normalized until nobody sees it anymore. If this is your result, your work is not optimization. It is selection and readiness: getting your process documented well enough that you can evaluate a platform against something real instead of against a demo.
Level 2, The Activation Stage. Zero to three months post go-live. You are live, but you are adjusting. Timesheets are inconsistent, nobody trusts the data yet, and there is no reporting rhythm. This is where a lot of teams get discouraged, because they expected go-live to feel like an ending. Your work here is consistency, not perfection. Timesheet compliance, one named owner for data hygiene, and the discipline to resist reconfiguring the system before you have enough clean data to know what actually needs changing.
Level 3, The Optimization Window. Roughly six to nine months in. You are starting to understand your own data and see what you would do differently. The change request list comes to life. That feels like failure and it is the opposite: it is the signal that your team has matured enough to ask better questions. Your work is triage. Sort the requests that would change a decision from the ones that would change a screen, and spend your budget on the first group. This is the window where an optimization engagement pays for itself, and it does not stay open forever.
Level 4, Operational Maturity. Around the twelve month mark. Reporting is running, the system is running, and things are basically fine. This is where "I don't know what I don't know" lives. Features you never turned on, configurations that made sense on day one and are limiting you by year two, workarounds that have hardened into policy. Your work is a structured look at what you are not using. This is the level I get called into most often, and it is almost never because something broke.
Level 5, Strategic Command. Fewer than one in ten organizations I have worked with operate here, and the ones that do got there by investing in people, process, and technology together rather than picking one. Every dashboard has a decision attached to it. Finance, Services, and Operations are looking at the same numbers and reaching the same conclusions. Your work at this level is protection: keeping the discipline in place through reorgs, new leadership, and the next platform change.
Five different levels, five different next actions. That is why the specific answer beats the range.
What the assessment actually is
A few minutes, no email wall to get your result, no personality-quiz filler.
It is built on the same anchor-based lifecycle the model describes, the way these organizations actually mature in practice, not a generic scoring average that lumps a brand-new SuiteProjects Pro go-live in with a three-year-old configuration. You answer candidly about where your operation sits today, and it gives you your level and what that level means.
That is it. The point is not to score you. The point is to hand you a starting line.
When your result does not match your gut
One thing worth a second thought: did your result match your instinct, or did it land a level off from where you would have placed yourself? That mismatch is where the useful information lies.
Scoring lower than you expected is the more common outcome, and it almost always traces back to the same two things: adoption that is thinner than leadership believes, and data nobody fully trusts. Both are fixable. Neither gets fixed by a feature.
Scoring higher than you expected happens too, and it usually means a team has built good operating habits without ever naming them. That is worth knowing, because habits that live in people's heads leave when those people do.
A result that lands a level below your instinct is not bad news. It is the first specific thing you have been handed to fix.
What comes after your result
Knowing your level is step one. The SOMM Level-Up series walks through what it actually takes to move from where you are to the next stage, one piece per transition. Your result is the map. The series is the route.
Take the assessment first, then start with the transition you are standing in front of.
Know your level and want help acting on it?
Most of the work I do starts exactly here: a team with a result, a change request list, and no clear read on which items are worth the budget. If you want a second set of eyes on what your level means for your next twelve months, let's talk.
