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From Firefighting to Forecasting: How IT and Engineering Firms Use the Operational Maturity Model to Scale

By Shivani Kumar

Updated: June 10, 2026

Read Time: 5 minutes

Table of Contents

Blog Highlights

Only 31% of projects are delivered on time, on budget, and within scope — organisations waste $97M per $1B invested due to poor project performance (PMI, 2025).
7 core features define a delivery-grade project management system — from project planning and resource management to real-time financials and portfolio dashboards.
3 platform types evaluated: general-purpose tools, traditional PPM platforms, and purpose-built PSA+PPM systems — each suited to a different buyer and delivery model.
5 questions every enterprise buyer must answer before selecting a platform — covering problem definition, delivery methodology, financial governance, vertical fit, and true TCO.
Purpose-built platforms deliver 21% faster delivery cycles, 14% higher resource utilisation, and 12% more billable hours — outcomes general tools do not consistently produce.
Microsoft Project Online reaches end-of-life in September 2026 — organisations still on legacy PPM tools need a migration path to a more capable, integrated platform now.

Operational Maturity Model is a 5-tier framework for helping IT and engineering services organizations to measure the repeatability, measurability and optimize delivery services – as well as define a path to achieve improved workforce productivity and revenue predictability. Organizations at maturity level 3 and above consistently outperform counterparts in delivery margins and capacity forecasting accuracy.

The Mistake That Changed How We Think About Maturity

In 2022, a mid-sized Indian IT services company won a massive infrastructure modernization contract. The engagement was led by a project director who had previously completed a dozen comparable projects. The delivery team was competent. Yet, at the 14-month mark, the client had elevated the issue. Cost overruns were running at 34%. The team had lost two senior architects without plans to backfill. Nobody had a full picture of who had what skills, at what utilization, for which engagements.

The cause was not personnel. The organization had no consistent structure for judging delivery readiness prior to undertaking a commitment. Resource allocation relied on spreadsheets and the rumor mill. While mechanisms for risk escalation were written down on paper, they weren’t enacted in reality.

This experience isn’t an anomaly. PMI’s 2024 Pulse of the Profession report notes that only 32% of organizations say they have high maturity in consistent project management practices, while project failures average $97 million lost per billion spent. For IT and engineering services businesses operating on very small margins, that gap between desired execution and actual performance is a question of survival.

The operational maturity model exists precisely for this problem.

It differs from resource allocation in an important way:

What the Operational Maturity Model Actually Measure

A structured approach that examines the way an organization controls its people, processes, technology, and business outcomes – not in isolated projects, but in the context of its entire delivery operation – this is the OMM.

As defined by Gartner, operational maturity is used to: “…assess maturity in people, process, technology and business management dimensions, creating a road map for systematic, prioritized improvement.” This isn’t about generating a score, but developing a common understanding of how process gaps introduce delivery risk-and an orderly approach to addressing it.

For IT service organizations, engineering firms, GCCs, and pharma R&D organizations, OMM is a direct map to commercial outcomes such as utilization levels, project margins, consistency of delivery times, and retention of recurring work based on the quality of delivery as opposed to the price.

The Five Maturity Levels: Where Does Your Organization Sit?

Why Capacity Planning Breaks Down Before Level 3

The single biggest pain point that brings an IT services leader to OMM assessment is capacity planning. And capacity planning breaks for a structural reason, not a tool reason.

At Level 1 and 2 skills data resides in HR, project data in project tools and financial data in ERP, so there’s never a single view. When sales closes a deal for delivery, they can’t look up the skills in real-time without pulling someone off a live project and thereby cascading gaps through the organization.

This sequential problem is by far the #1 cause of margin erosion at mid-market IT services firms. Projects are staffed with available, not skilled resources; rates are lowered to compensate for the risk in delivery; junior people are staffed on senior level scopes, the client complains and the margin tightens.

A good capacity planning system has Level 3 as its bedrock – standard roles, skills taxonomies, pipeline data in a single tool. Without this foundation, the capacity planning reports are viewed with enough skepticism by most of the user base not to make the reports useful for action.

Organisations in Level 2-to-3 should look at dedicated PSA solutions. The advantage of PSA solutions is they were purpose-built for services delivery, by people within the services delivery industry. These solutions, which combine resource management, project scheduling and financial data into a single tool, will help organizations like yours transform work-force planning from weeks into hours and are guaranteed to deliver 14% better resource utilization and a 12% better billable hours within 1 year.

Workforce Efficiency Is a Maturity Problem, Not a Hiring Problem

Almost all IT service leaders that are experiencing issues with workforce effectiveness, discuss it in terms of a supply issue. I don’t have enough skilled people; I need to recruit more quickly; I need to hang onto the most talented people.

That framing is wrong, and it is expensive.

PMI 2024 report has identified that the majority of all organizations are running numerous separate PM tools in parallel. Such a fragmented working environment is actively decreasing efficiency of the workforce because it is creating a need for the PM to compile the various reports in a single format, blinding resource usage and making it structurally impossible to move people between high- and low- value jobs quickly.

The only effective prescription for an organization in this part of its journey is to get project, resource and financial data integrated on one platform first and then add people. Hiring people to work in a disconnected data environment exacerbates the problem: more dollars spent without fixing the structural resistance that causes inefficiency. Efficiency gains in the workforce from Level 3 onward come from eliminating that resistance-not adding people.

How IT and Engineering Leaders Use OMM to Build a Roadmap

An OMM assessment without a roadmap is just a diagnosis. The commercial value comes from the sequenced
improvement plan.

In relation to technology choice, it is critical that organizations are considering single systems that can span the entire project life cycle, from opportunity analysis through resource assignment, delivery monitoring and project financials.AI-powered PSA + PPM platforms that are built from the ground up for the IT Services, Engineering, GCC, and pharma verticals have been shown to have an uplift of 21% to faster project delivery cycles and 9% margin gain through the utilization of predictive forecasting in enterprise deployments

What High-Maturity IT Organisations Do Differently

Organisations at Level 4 and Level 5 share three behaviours that lower-maturity firms rarely replicate:

That’s actually what differentiates Level 3 organizations from Level 1 organisations. It’s not the number of frameworks implemented, it is the discipline within which the organization runs the frameworks they actually have.

The Real Cost of Standing Still

All IT and engineering services leaders would probably agree that they need to enhance the level of their operational maturity. Only very few are taking actions to make that improvement happen at a pace that is needed. Typically, they assume it’s a long-term, low-priority effort that must be handled after the quarter-end delivery crisis has been defused.

That calculation is backwards.

Level 2 activity on each quarterly cycle costs the enterprise money, whether measured as a Senior Resource who spends time billing below capacity, or whether measured as sales writing off discounts in light of delivery uncertainty, or as Project Managers spending days doing data reconciliation rather than delivery. PMI 2024 puts waste at $97 Million per billion $ of project expenditure – this is not a rounding error for a 500 Cr IT services enterprise, it is a strategic risk.

So, which organizations get to level 3 fastest and how do they do it. There is one defining feature of the OMM improvement roadmap in those companies that have already achieved it, the OMM improvement roadmap is a revenue driver, not a process initiative. It is measured in terms of uplift in utilization, in terms of recovery in margin, in terms of contract win rate; not in terms of frameworks adopted and not in terms of certificates held.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Operational Maturity Model (OMM) is a five-level scale that allows IT & Engineering Services organizations to assess the repeatability, measurability and optimization of their delivery operations. The framework assesses operations based on people, process, technology & governance - and maps directly onto commercial results (resource utilization, project margins, consistency of on time delivery etc.).

There are 5 maturity levels: Level 1 - Ad Hoc (reactive, unrepeatable processes). Level 2 - Managed (little documented procedures, gut feel decisions). Level 3 - Defined (defined processes, proactive resource management). Level 4 - Quantitatively managed (data driven forecasting and decision making). Level 5 - Optimized (continual improvement via automation). At level 3 and above, organizations significantly outperform their peers on delivery margins and capacity plan accuracy.

With processes documented and rudimentary metrics tracked at Level 2, decision-making is largely still gut-based, with no impact of current performance on future projects' scope or staffing. Level 3 sees all delivery units running according to common processes, resource management becomes proactive, capacity planning becomes feasible due to integrated skills, pipeline and allocation data and compounding operational returns start.

Why is this capacity planning at levels below 3 broken? Because the data is in silo's; skills, projects, financial etc.. When a sales person signs a new deal, there is no way of knowing resource availability without "stealing" resources from existing engagements, thus starting a cascade of problems. Projects get staff with who is available as opposed to who is appropriate, and billing rates get reduced to offset the delivery risk, thereby crushing margins.

Based on PMI's 2024 Pulse of the Profession report, each billion dollars spent on projects amounts to $97 million lost by the organisation, due to poor maturity levels of project management practices. For a 500-crore IT services firm this amount is a tangible strategic liability - manifesting itself in idle senior resources, price erosion and a lot of hours put in by PM's in data reconciliation vs. Delivery.

An OMM assessment ranks the organisation separately on each of the four dimensions of people (skill data quality, roles standardisation), process (delivery consistency, escalation process), technology (tool integration, data visibility) and governance (decision rights, reviews). This scoring happens across the five maturity levels independently for each dimension, as it may be possible for an organisation to be at Level 3 of process while also being at Level 1 of data visibility, both having separate remediation efforts.

Specialised IT service PSA tools can help integrate the scheduling, resource assignment, skills analysis, financial monitoring into one single system; and this single, unified system is essentially the core technological enabler of the Level 3 maturity. As an example of the benefits of doing so, customers have seen a 14% increase in resource utilization and a 12% increase in billable hours after the first year after consolidating their planning systems into a PSA tool. "If an organization's capacity planning tool outputs an unreliable report that no one is confident to make decisions based upon," so say the analyst; then it is not truly helpful.

To start a GCC, the very first step is to conduct a capability assessment against people, process, technology and governance. At the Level 2-3 transition, what is the quickest way ahead is to consolidate project, resource and financial data onto an integrated PSA system, then hire people. It makes more trouble to hire people when data is scattered, so that the expenses would only grow and problem is still the systemic friction.

The one thing level 4 and 5 organizations have in common is that they all perform three key processes: The ability to carry out a formal capacity readiness check prior to contract acceptance, thus ensuring that the commitments made at the beginning of the project and the resources provided are aligned from the start; Post delivery reviews that are formalized and where outcome information directly informs future resource management and pricing decisions; A live link between the project data and the financial data to enable pre-emptive control actions rather than reactive remedial actions.

Organizations that bring project, resource, and financials together in one integrated PSA platform often notice demonstrable gains in maturity in 2-4 quarters. A 2024 GCC aerospace case study showed that after consolidating the project intake process and automating status reporting, the two Level 3 core requirements, senior engineers were able to reclaim 7 billable hours per week in two quarters. Level 2 bottleneck is fractured data, solving this yields the most rapid, obvious results.

Shivani Kumar

Shivani Kumar is the Co-founder and Head of Marketing at Kytes, and part of the founding team since day one. She’s helped build the AI-enabled PSA+PPM platform from the ground up—translating customer pain points and market gaps into executable roadmaps. She believes AI creates real value only with strong systems and structured data. She applies that lens across product, GTM, and marketing, and shares practical, real-life insights from her experience in SaaS, AI, and B2B marketing.