The Praveg OPTIC Maturity Model™
OPTIC is a lens for examining how an organisation actually works: five pillars, twenty-five dimensions and a thirty-five-item diagnostic, calibrated to the maturity your organisation needs and sequenced by a written rule. Part of PBAS™, the Praveg Business Acceleration System.
The Galloping HorseStrong in Process and Technology, weak in Organisation and Improvement. It moves fast and drifts off course, because nobody is watching the instruments.
Current maturityTarget profile
Organisations that struggle tend to struggle in the same five places: their people and structure, their processes, their technology, their ability to measure and improve, and their ability to read their own context.
OPTIC assesses, in one structured pass, where an organisation stands across all five, and then makes deliberate, prioritised choices about where to focus energy, in what sequence and with what governance. It does not replace PMBOK, ITIL, Lean or ISO 9001. It is the wider lens that shows which of them you need, where, and in what order.
The maturity scale and the pillar categories stand on established ground, and the book says so plainly. What OPTIC adds is the combination, made explicit and made light enough to use.
Most maturity models tell you where the gaps are. The Priority Lens combines where the gap is, what it is costing and what else it is holding back, and writes the answer down: Priority Score = (Gap × Impact) + Dependency.
“Adapt this to your situation” becomes a step with an artefact: the Target Maturity Profile, an explicit statement of what level this organisation needs in each pillar, now and on the next horizon.
Behavioural anchor ladders, cumulative levels, red-flag caps and no averaging. OPTIC scores come out lower and harsher than most frameworks produce. That is a feature.
Thirty-five items, not two hundred. Built for the fifty-to-five-hundred-person organisation that is too complex for improvisation and too resource-constrained for enterprise-grade appraisal.
Each letter is a capability area through which the organisation is examined. Each pillar has five dimensions: the specific capabilities the instrument rates.
The human foundation
The operational engine
The force multiplier
The growth mechanism
The calibrating capability
A score means nothing until you know what it is measured against. Every pillar starts at a target of three; four drivers move it. Try the drivers for your own organisation.
The starting selection is the book's worked example: a 120-person contract research organisation, GCP-regulated, growing 40% a year, serving two jurisdictions.
O 3 P 4 T 4 I 3 C 4
No five needed anywhere.
Target, NowNext horizonBaseline of 3
On a real assessment the profile is set by the assessment team from evidence, not by the organisation's reading of itself. A self-set profile, like this one, is provisional.
The OPTIC Cycle runs the whole model: three steps of diagnosis, three of programme, then round again on a better baseline.
Read the four drivers and set the Target Maturity Profile, Now and Next-Horizon.
Rate 25 dimensions on anchor ladders; in Deep, run 10 red-flag checks.
Map impact and score the Priority Lens: lead, support, stabilise, simplify.
Specific, owned, time-bounded, measurable interventions.
Sequenced execution, adoption monitored, friction addressed fast.
KPIs, retrospectives, Rapid quarterly, Deep annually; then re-calibrate.
Steps 1 to 3: the diagnostic (PBAS Assess)Steps 4 to 6: the programme (PBAS Accelerate and Sustain)
A diagnostic that is too heavy to run is a diagnostic that does not get run. The whole instrument is thirty-five items, and it comes in two depths.
First encounter with the model, and quarterly pulse-checks between full assessments.
Rapid tells you where to look. It is never presented with the authority of a Deep result.
Annual assessment, pre-transformation baseline, inspection readiness review.
Deep tells you what is there. Most of the elapsed time goes on gathering evidence, not on answering questions.
The assessment is administered on this site under an access code, and the results build as responses arrive.
Praveg issues a code for each assessment round. The code decides the depth: Rapid or Deep. Respondents give their department, role level and experience, then rate.
Results read by department, role level, experience, pillar and dimension, including the gap between how leadership and teams see the same organisation.
Quarterly Rapid pulses and annual Deep assessments sit on one timeline, so movement in every pillar and dimension is visible round to round.
| Exec | Senior | Mid | Lead | Team | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| O | 3.6 | 3.2 | 2.9 | 2.7 | 2.5 |
| P | 3.6 | 3.3 | 3.2 | 3.0 | 2.8 |
| T | 3.6 | 3.4 | 3.3 | 3.3 | 3.2 |
| I | 3.1 | 2.7 | 2.4 | 2.3 | 2.2 |
| C | 3.2 | 2.9 | 2.8 | 2.5 | 2.0 |
Shaded by distance from all responses
Pharmaceutical research
A pharmaceutical research organisation had grown from around sixty people to over one hundred and forty in under three years and wanted a new data management platform in place before investor due diligence. The radar stopped the conversation: Technology was a four, Organisation a two, and Process a three with SOP documentation at two as its limiting dimension. Eight weeks of process documentation, governance redesign and accountability mapping followed. When the due diligence team arrived, what impressed them was the organisational clarity, and the platform built later worked because it stood on solid ground.
Chapter 3, Praveg OPTIC Maturity Model (First Edition 2026)Manufacturing and distribution
A three-hundred-person manufacturer had just won a contract that would raise volume by sixty per cent in eighteen months, and the CEO wanted to buy production technology first. Technology was already a four. Organisation sat at two and was visibly fragile at the coming scale. The Priority Lens put Organisation first on dependency, Process from month three, Technology from month six. The increase landed within cost and without a quality incident. The CEO's verdict: “I thought you were being conservative. You were being precise.”
Chapter 9, Praveg OPTIC Maturity Model (First Edition 2026)Engineering and infrastructure
Eighteen months into a digital transformation, adoption of the new ERP, mobile field reporting and dashboard sat at 35 per cent and the CEO was considering writing it off. The assessment found the software was fine: field engineers were entering data into fields that did not map to how work was tracked on site, because nobody had documented the real workflows before configuration. A six-week process redesign, then reconfiguration to match reality, took adoption from 35 to 78 per cent within two months.
Chapter 2, Praveg OPTIC Maturity Model (First Edition 2026)Field vignettes are drawn from real engagements and have been anonymised, compressed and in places composited, as the book itself states. Figures are as reported by the people involved, not audited. They illustrate patterns; they are not case-study evidence.
The complete model, the thirty-five-item instrument, the KPI reference library, the roadmap method and field vignettes from two decades of practice. First Edition 2026, forthcoming.
By Sagar Kalantre, Founder and Director of Praveg Consultancy Services LLP.
A practitioner-derived organisational maturity model with five pillars (Organisation & People, Process, Technology, Improvement, Context), twenty-five dimensions and a thirty-five-item diagnostic. Every rating is read against a Target Maturity Profile calibrated to the organisation, not against a universal five. It is part of PBAS, the Praveg Business Acceleration System.
Mid-market organisations of 50 to 500 people, often founder-led, in or adjacent to regulated industries: project-driven firms, pharmaceutical and clinical research organisations, growing professional services firms and organisations in transformation.
Three things. It calibrates a target before it scores, so level five is not the goal. It never averages: a pillar's level is the median of its dimensions with the limiting dimension named, and a red flag caps a pillar at two. And it decides where to start with a written rule, the Priority Lens, rather than a judgement call.
OPTIC Rapid is self-rated on the twenty-five ladders and produces a provisional radar and lead-pillar hypothesis. OPTIC Deep is evidenced and multi-assessor, takes 2 to 4 weeks, uses all thirty-five items under five scoring rules and produces pillar and dimension radars, limiting dimensions and a scored Priority Lens. A Rapid result is never presented with the authority of a Deep result.
Yes, by invitation. Praveg issues an access code for each assessment round; the code decides whether respondents see OPTIC Rapid or OPTIC Deep. The question set is not published on the open site.
OPTIC is practitioner-derived, and its evidentiary status is stated openly: the instrument has not yet been through formal psychometric validation, the calibration drivers are structured judgement rather than derived weights, and a five-stage validation roadmap is in progress through the assessment platform.
No. Every pillar starts at a target of three; four drivers move it; the cap is five and the floor is two. Over-maturity is a real and expensive condition, so the finding is the gap between current and target maturity, in either direction.
A discovery call to read the four drivers and decide whether OPTIC Rapid or OPTIC Deep is the right first step for your organisation.