In-Depth answer: How can I assess organizational maturity with respect to accessibility?

Maturity Assessments

To reach your stated goals for organization-wide accessibility, it helps to know your starting point(s) and have a means to track progress throughout your implementation projects. It is natural to start off with statements that are aspirational but broad:

“We need to do better with inclusion of people with disabilities in our workforce.”

A useful tactic is to turn vague language into specific statements, and this requires measurements:

“For people with disabilities in the workforce, the industry average is 3.2% (source: National Organization on Disability). Our rate is currently x.xx%. Within two years we aim to double this figure, and within four years we aim to be at the industry average or beyond.”

You can make similar goal statements about how accessible your website is, how often accessibility awareness training takes place, how many projects have addressed accessibility throughout the product life-cycle, and so on. The key need at the beginning of the goal-setting process is to know what the value of x is currently for each measure. (If you don’t have a measure of what’s happening now, how will you know that your efforts are getting you toward your stated goals? In this case, the measure of your progress can be expressed as we don’t know the value of x currently.)

This isn’t a new problem, and there are a lot of published resources from which to draw guidance. In the past, the fields of management and software collectively recognized similar needs of establishing metrics for measuring progress. One well known source that emerged to meet these needs for understanding and measuring organizations is the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). (And, for software, the associated Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI).). In the CMM, there are five levels of maturity that can be applied to any department or other operational subset of the organization: (1) Initial; (2) Repeatable; (3) Defined; (4) Managed; and (5) Optimizing. Here’s a worked example of using a CMM approach. If we are conducting our maturity assessment and we go with our clipboard to our HR manager, and ask how many people with disabilities (x) work in our 10,000 employee company:

HR Manager: “I have no idea. We don’t track that. I think I saw a wheelchair user once but I’m not sure if she was a visitor or an employee. It was from a distance, so I’m uncertain. Why do you ask?”

You would mark for your maturity score:

• Representation of people with disabilities in the workforce:
  Level 1, Initial (chaotic, ad hoc)

So even though x isn’t measured as such, you have your measure of Level 1, and consequently the goal might be to move to level 2 or above by the next assessment date.

How might higher levels be represented in the responses you obtain?:

Level 2 HR Manager: “We do include a non-discrimination statement at the bottom of each new job posting, and that’s been our policy since day one and we do send reminders out from time to time to those making hiring decisions. We don’t currently track numbers but I think we have a handful of people with disabilities employed here. We do want to start tracking numbers though, and it’s on my agenda for our next HR planning meeting.”

• Representation of people with disabilities in the workforce:
  Level 2, Repeatable (procedures defined and communicated)

Level 3 HR Manager: “That’s Jane’s job. She is currently working on a process to identify how many people with disabilities we have working here and how we can encourage more participation. She just got back from a conference on this topic. I understand it’s a bit tricky because some people have disabilities but they don’t want to disclose this for various reasons. Would you like to talk to Jane about her plans?”

• Representation of people with disabilities in the workforce:
  Level 3, Defined (standard business process)

Level 4 HR Manager: “Well, looking at our most recent report from the third quarter, let me pull this up… We’re at 0.4% of the workforce who have disclosed. Of the 189 people we hired this year so far, it looks like just one has a disability. This isn’t great, we know. So that’s where we are now. I’d like to double or triple that figure. I think we can do this with the new training improvements that are under development. We also need to make it easier for people to feel okay about self-declaring disabilities. We know this number is always substantially under-reported, so the number is bound to be much higher, but sadly that’s our official figure for now, 0.4%.”

(Note: This is our first instance of knowing the value of x.)

• Representation of people with disabilities in the workforce:
  Level 4, Managed (quantitatively managed with agreed-upon metrics)
       Current:        0.4%
       Target:         1.2%

Level 5 HR Manager: “We surpassed our goals from last year and now we’re at 1.3%. That’s still not good enough though, as it’s so below the representation of people with disabilities in the working population. We need to get on top of this. We have a task force analyzing the problem and working to figure out and then resolve how we got here in the first place. We have agreed to double our efforts with new targets, and we’ve set 3% as our new goal.”

• Representation of people with disabilities in the workforce:
  Level 5, Optimizing (efficient process management and improvement initiatives)
       Current:        1.3%
       Target:         3%

This is the basic process for every maturity assessment. Depending on the source, there are different terminology choices for the maturity levels. Some use as few as three levels, others may use up to six. There is always one level where you start getting actual number measurements that you can use to state exactly where you are now, and have figures to track progress towards goals.

Note: The example above is a rather simplistic from to illustrate the principles. In practical terms, as maturity increases, the questions will increase in scope. For instance, we used employment numbers as the example, and if the Level 1 answer was the one you found, you might stop there. But, at higher levels, you might be asking about retention of people with disabilities in the workforce, promotion to management and executive levels, and representation on operational committees. When you add in all of the applicable departments, the range of questions becomes much broader still, and so the first time a maturity assessment is conducted, the process can be time consuming, and involve a good deal of trial-and-error.

Stakeholders

Who should you be asking about the maturity level of accessibility in your organization? It should ideally be the people who are responsible and accountable for various pertinent operational aspects. What makes something pertinent? This should be anything that has to do with employees (the population includes people with disabilities), the customers (the population includes people with disabilities) and the provision of products and services (the main function of organizations) and whether those products and services are made and delivered in such a way as to be accessible to consumers (because… you guessed it… the population includes people with disabilities). In short, pretty much every operational aspect should be considered pertinent. And, if you know already that accessibility only happens in one unit (e.g., customer-facing website development), you should still go and ask the questions of each organizational unit, because (a) you may find there are people with plans but no resources; (b) if you decide in advance to not address one organizational unit and they did have a plan in place, it would be awkward for you to be presenting your findings and hear “But why didn’t you ask us. This is on our radar!” and (c) the very act of asking the question raises awareness in the organization, even if the responses first time out are mostly at Level 1.

We state in a number of other guides (see related sections at the end of this article) that it is important to get executive support from the beginning of any accessibility initiative. You don’t want to be knocking on doors only to have those closed to you because the other party assumes you have no authority to be asking them questions. So, executives, in addition to being one of your sets of stakeholders, also provide the authority and permissions necessary to conduct a maturity assessment with the other stakeholders.

Note: There may already be a department responsible for tracking maturity in individual aspects (e.g., software development) or organization-wide, especially in a large and/or multi-national organizations. If this is so, seek them out, learn from them, and maybe partner with them.

Conduct the assessment

We suggest including the following three components when you are starting out making your first organizational maturity assessment:

1. Review current policies first. Before you start interviewing anybody, find out what, if any, available policies say about what should be happening within your organization. This may be referenced by anyone you interview and it is therefore useful for you to review before you speak with them. (The maturity assessment concerns what is actually happening, as opposed to what should be happening.)
2. Decide on a maturity assessment scale and tool. There are numerous published methods. A useful tool for conducting your first ever assessment is the PDAA tool…

1. Be aware of common issues in advance. Some respondents may be reluctant to share information, especially if accessibility is a new concept to them. There is no need for judgment if an accessibility program hasn’t even been put in place yet (you have to start somewhere). Use the related sections (below) to learn about techniques to improve your data collection process.

Note: Maturity assessments are a tool that can be used either before or after setting strategy and goals. If accessibility has never been addressed before, an assessment can reveal how much knowledge currently exists within the company that can be utilized in strategy and goal-setting. Or, if the strategy is already defined, then the maturity assessment can be used to establish where you are now, and allow you to better state your improvement goals for the organization. For strategy and goal-setting, see our accompanying Guide on Introducing organization-wide accessibility approaches, linked to in the Related Sections, below.