Why We Built Our Own Assessment Framework (And What It Means for You)

We have moved away from using established frameworks as the primary lens for our assessments and launched our own independent measurement model. Thirty service management disciplines across six groups, scored against our own 0 to 4 maturity scale, and informed by twelve years of consultant-led assessment data across UK enterprise IT.

Why We Combined Framework Knowledge With Independent Assessment

Our consultants have spent careers working with the mainstream frameworks. That depth of knowledge is not going anywhere. It informs how we think, how we diagnose problems and how we advise clients on improvement. ITIL, SIAM and ISO 20000 are excellent bodies of knowledge, and our team has built careers working with all of them.

The distinction is between using a framework as a body of knowledge, which is exactly what it is designed for, and using it as the primary ruler for assessment. Frameworks define what good looks like. What they are not designed to do is tell you how your specific organisation is performing relative to comparable peers, diagnose why particular gaps persist, or prioritise where to focus first given your context. Those questions require something different: independent data, consultant judgement, and a model built from what actually works across hundreds of real engagements.

Drawing on the Best of What Exists, Without Being Bound by Any of It

Our model draws on the language of ITIL, SIAM and ISO 20000 because that is the language IT teams speak and the terminology your people already understand. But the questions we ask, how we score them and what we do with the results are entirely our own.

The result is a more complete picture of where a client actually stands: root-cause diagnosed, scored against our independent maturity scale, and with a roadmap built around their specific context and priorities. Our consultants bring twelve years of real-world engagement data to bear directly in the findings and readout, alongside deep knowledge of the frameworks themselves. It is that combination that makes the difference.

One element that sets the model apart is what we call the Behavioural Baseline. It is a layer of indicators that sits above all thirty disciplines and assesses the cultural and operational habits that either accelerate or undermine everything else. Things like how seriously an organisation takes continual improvement as a behaviour rather than a process, how visible work is across teams, and how it thinks about value. No standard framework assesses this. Most assessments do not go near it. In our experience, it is often where the real answers are.

Just as we have always been tool agnostic, no vendor relationships, no implementation partnerships, no agenda beyond what is right for the client, we are now truly framework agnostic too. No commercial ties to any framework body. Just twelve years of independent assessment data and a model built from what we have actually seen working in practice across UK enterprise IT.

A New Platform to Match

Alongside the new framework, we have completely rebuilt our assessment platform. What clients experience during an engagement, and the quality of output they receive at the end of it, has taken a significant step forward.

The platform is called the Clarity Assessment™. It is proprietary, built specifically for the way we work, and designed to support the depth and rigour our independent model demands. It is used throughout the engagement as a structured capture environment for stakeholder interviews, scoring, notes and report generation, with tailored question sets for different stakeholder groups. Findings are then shaped into consultant-authored reports, reviewed by our Director of Consulting before delivery.

The Clarity Assessment™ also supports something our previous platform could not: a structured, consistent view of where an organisation sits against our independent maturity scale across all thirty disciplines, giving consultants and clients alike a clearer picture of current state and where the greatest opportunities lie.

What This Means in Practice

If you are new to The ITSM People, this is what an independent ITSM assessment looks like when it is built around what actually matters: not framework compliance, but how well your service management genuinely performs and where the greatest opportunities for improvement lie.

After twelve years of asking that question independently, we are confident we know how to answer it. And now we have a platform and a model built specifically to do so.