Understand Your Organization.
Identify Your Gaps.
Prioritize Your Next Steps.
Organizational improvement begins with a clear understanding of where you are today and where you want to go. Optimize University, part of Optimize International, offers four organizational assessments to help leaders examine their organization’s capabilities, alignment, performance, and approach to risk.
Whether you are beginning your Journey to Optimization or refining an established improvement strategy, these assessments provide a structured starting point for identifying strengths, uncovering gaps, and focusing your improvement efforts.
Explore Our Four Assessments
Organizational Optimization Maturity Assessment
How prepared is your organization to achieve and sustain optimization?
Examine the maturity of your organization’s approach to optimization, including leadership commitment, planning, processes, performance measurement, and continuous improvement. Identify areas that need development and establish a foundation for a more focused optimization journey.
The Organizational Optimization Maturity Assessment provides organizations with a structured way to evaluate their current level of maturity across the 16 critical categories of Organizational Optimization, including strategy, performance, risk, processes, improvement, resources, financial management, technology, knowledge, innovation, customers, markets, and world-class performance. Using a five-level maturity progression—from Foundational and Developing through Defined, Managed, and Optimized—the assessment helps leaders understand where their organization stands today, identify strengths and capability gaps, and prioritize the areas with the greatest potential for improvement.
This assessment is important because organizations cannot effectively optimize what they have not first evaluated and understood. By establishing an objective baseline, leadership can make better-informed decisions, focus resources on the highest-priority opportunities, measure progress over time, and develop a targeted roadmap for advancing organizational maturity. Ultimately, the assessment transforms optimization from a broad aspiration into a measurable, actionable journey toward improved performance, sustainable results, and world-class organizational excellence.
Organizational Effectiveness and Efficiency Assessment
Are you achieving the right results while making the best use of your resources?
Evaluate how well your organization achieves its objectives and uses its people, time, processes, and resources. Identify opportunities to strengthen outcomes, reduce waste, address bottlenecks, and improve productivity.
The Organizational Effectiveness & Efficiency Assessment helps leaders determine whether their organization is achieving the right results while using its people, processes, resources, time, technology, and financial capacity in the best possible way. Effectiveness focuses on achieving strategic objectives, meeting customer and stakeholder needs, and delivering desired outcomes, while efficiency examines how well resources are utilized, waste and duplication are reduced, processes are improved, costs are managed, and productivity is maximized.
By evaluating areas such as strategic alignment, performance results, process effectiveness, resource utilization, cost efficiency, productivity, and quality, the assessment provides leaders with a comprehensive picture of how well the organization is performing and where improvement opportunities exist. It is important because strong results alone are not enough if they require excessive resources, and efficiency alone has little value if the organization is not achieving the right outcomes.
The assessment enables leaders to identify performance gaps, prioritize high-impact opportunities, implement targeted improvements, measure progress, and continuously optimize performance—ultimately producing better results, better use of resources, greater value, and sustainable organizational excellence.
TAKE THE ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS & EFFICIENCY ASSESSMENT
Organizational Alignment Assessment
Is your organization working together toward shared goals?
Examine the connections among your mission, vision, strategy, leadership, teams, and day-to-day activities. Identify gaps in communication, coordination, and priorities that may prevent your organization from translating strategy into consistent action.
The Organizational Alignment Assessment evaluates how effectively the critical elements of an organization—vision, strategy, people, processes, resources, technology, and performance—work together toward a common direction and desired results. It helps leaders identify gaps and misalignment between what the organization intends to accomplish and how it actually operates, providing a clearer understanding of where priorities, people, capabilities, and resources may be working at cross-purposes.
The assessment is important because even a strong strategy cannot produce sustainable results when the organization is not aligned to execute it. By systematically assessing, identifying, prioritizing, and addressing alignment gaps, leaders can create greater organizational focus, strengthen employee engagement, better allocate resources, integrate processes and technology, and improve execution. Ultimately, the assessment helps create one vision, one team, and one direction—connecting what the organization plans with how it operates to achieve measurable, sustainable performance and organizational excellence.
Enterprise Risk Management Assessment
How well does your organization identify, manage, and monitor risk?
Evaluate your organization’s approach to recognizing and addressing risks that could affect its objectives. Identify opportunities to strengthen risk awareness, accountability, decision-making, and organizational resilience.
The Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) Assessment evaluates how mature and effective an organization is at identifying, assessing, prioritizing, responding to, monitoring, and communicating risk across the enterprise. Rather than treating risk management as simply a compliance activity or risk register, the assessment examines critical capabilities including governance and leadership, strategy, risk identification and assessment, prioritization and response, monitoring and reporting, organizational risk culture, and the integration of risk information into strategic decision-making.
The results help leaders understand their current ERM maturity, identify capability gaps and significant risks, establish priorities, assign accountability, and develop a practical roadmap for improvement. This assessment is important because risk cannot be eliminated, but it can be understood, prioritized, managed, monitored, and incorporated into better decisions.
When ERM is effectively integrated with strategy and performance, it enables organizations to protect stakeholder value, strengthen resilience, improve performance, anticipate disruption, and pursue opportunities with greater awareness of uncertainty – making risk management an essential component of Organizational Optimization.
Turn Understanding Into Action
Use your assessment findings to guide leadership discussions, prioritize improvement opportunities, and shape your organization’s development plan. Continue your Journey to Optimization through Optimize University’s courses and learning resources, including Journey to Optimization by Robert Hutcherson, PhD, available as a book and audiobook.
Ready to take the next step? Explore the assessment that best fits your organization’s current needs—or use all four to develop a broader view of your improvement priorities.