From shell scripts on a laptop to fully autonomous systems, automation is often seen as a goal in itself.
However, it’s essential to apply the right strategy for the level of maturity your organisation is currently at. Understanding where you are on this journey can help you:

• Spot operational bottlenecks

• Prioritise automation efforts

• Build more resilient and scalable systems

Let’s explore the five stages of automation maturity, what characterises each one, and how to progress to the next.

Stage 1: no automation

We do everything manually

This is where most teams begin. Deployments involve clicking through dashboards, provisioning resources by hand, and documenting steps in a wiki page or SharePoint. These documents quickly become outdated and are rarely maintained.

This phase may work for very small teams or early-stage prototypes, but as the organisation grows, the system becomes brittle. Even minor mistakes can lead to downtime or security issues.

Characteristics:

• Reliance on internal knowledge

• Inconsistent releases

• Slow and error prone operations

Key mindset shift: Start identifying the repeatable tasks.If you're doing something frequently, it's a candidate for automation.

Stage 2: local scripts

Someone wrote a script that helps

This stage often marks the beginning of engineering initiative. Automation begins to emerge organically. Someone on the team realises automation can save time and improve consistency, so they write a script. But the script lives on their laptop, isn’t documented, and often breaks in other environments. It’s progress , but still fragile.

Characteristics:

• Time saving, but isolated

• No standardisation or team ownership

• High organisation risk if the author leaves

Key mindset shift: Move from personal productivity to team-level responsibility. Standardise and share.

Stage 3: Centralised scripts

The team has shared scripts in version control

Scripts are now version-controlled and shared in a common repository. There’s some basic documentation, and anyone on the team can run them. This stage introduces structure and collaboration. However, the scripts are still loosely coupled from the system’s architecture and delivery lifecycle.

Characteristics:

• Shared ownership

• Version control and updates

• Reusability of the scripts across environments

Key mindset shift: Treat automation like any other code: review it and test it properly.

Stage 4: Infrastructure as code

Automation is part of our deployment pipeline

This is a significant turning point. Automation becomes part of the system architecture, not just a supporting tool. Infrastructure is managed as code, and deployments are triggered via CI/CD pipelines. The team introduces built-in policies for rollbacks, linting, and security. This stage lays the foundation for scale, consistency, and compliance.

Characteristics:

• Infrastructure as Code (IAC), using tools like Terraform or Ansible

• CI/CD pipelines integrated into daily workflows

• Automation is reliable, testable and secure

Key mindset shift: Treat your automation as a product: with quality standards and lifecycle management.

Stage 5: Self healing systems

The system detects and fixes problems automatically

While automation in previous stages is procedural, mature organisations begin building adaptive systems. Here, systems are designed to detect and recover from failure without human intervention. Monitoring tools provide feedback to drive decisions. Kubernetes reschedules pods, infrastructure auto-scales, and drift is corrected automatically.

Characteristics:

• Reactive systems become proactive

• Incident response times shrink

• Less manual intervention during outages

Key mindset shift: Build your infrastructure for observability and feedback loops. Your systems should monitor and heal themselves

Final thoughts

Every team sits somewhere on this spectrum. The goal isn’t to race to Stage 5 — it’s to move intentionally, reduce operational overhead, and build systems that are secure, scalable, and reliable.

A helpful exercise is this: Look at your last outage, deployment or change requests. Which stage did your team behave from? What would it take to move to the next level?

Automation maturity is not a technical milestone it is a cultural one. It is about how teams think, collaborate and evolve over time.