The Ops Report Card Is Back—Your Free IT Operations Maturity Checklist

At Stitchflow, we keep a close eye on what IT pros are sharing, recommending, and bookmarking, especially on Reddit, in Slack groups, and sysadmin forums. Over the years, one resource consistently came up in conversations about leveling up IT ops maturity: the Ops Report Card (originally hosted on opsreportcard.com).

A no-nonsense checklist of 32 yes/no questions that helped teams figure out where they stand and where they're falling short. When we noticed the original site had gone down, we decided to recreate it and make it live once again, easy to share and assess for IT teams.

A tribute, rebuilt for today's IT teams

We didn't rewrite or rebrand the content. That wasn't the point. The original authors' intent was clear: ask the right questions, tally your score, and use it as a framework to improve.

So we rebuilt it as an interactive, lightweight tool that keeps that spirit intact with modern UI, same words, same structure, and now easier to score and share. You can use it solo, with your team, or even with your boss. It's free to use and built to be explored on your terms.

TL;DR

• The Ops Report Card is back as a free, interactive IT Operations Maturity Checklist with 32 yes/no questions to benchmark your team’s practices.
• IT ops maturity means consistent processes, proactive problem prevention, safe deployments, and reliable recovery, and the checklist highlights where teams fall short.
• The value of the checklist lies in its simplicity: it exposes missing fundamentals that cause bigger downstream issues and creates a shared language for improvement.
• To act on your score, focus first on the biggest gaps, build maturity incrementally, use automation to scale, and revisit the checklist every 6–12 months.

What is IT ops maturity, and how does the Ops Report Card measure it?

IT operations maturity describes how well an organization’s IT practices are defined, consistent, and reliable. A mature team runs on documented processes, prevents problems before they escalate, automates routine work, deploys safely, recovers quickly, and measures performance to improve over time.

For many teams, the challenge isn’t knowing that maturity matters—it’s figuring out where to begin.

How does the Ops Report Card come in?

Created in 2012 by Tom Limoncelli and colleagues, the Ops Report Card provided a clear starting point to assess your IT process maturity. Instead of listing hundreds of best practices, the Ops Report Card uses 32 yes/no questions to check for fundamental practices.

Each question covers a concrete activity, such as tracking requests in a ticketing system or recording monthly metrics, and the questions are grouped into seven categories. A team’s score is simply the count of “yes” answers out of 32.

The 7 categories in the IT Ops Report Card

• Public-facing practices: Is your team easy to work with? Are requests tracked, and policies defined for end users?
• Modern team practices: Do you document internal procedures? Use version control? Have a bug tracker?
• Operational practices: Are services properly monitored? Do you write post-mortems? Have a sane on-call rotation?
• Automation: Are you using config management? Role accounts? Is your automation actually helpful—or just noisy?
• Fleet management: Do you know what machines you own? Is OS installation and patching consistent? What about PC refresh cycles?
• Disaster preparation: Have you tested your backups recently? Can you recover fast? Is your network core redundant?
• Security: Can you disable accounts or rotate passwords in an hour? Is anti-malware silently updating? Do you have a written policy?

‼️Pretty much all of the 32 questions—except question 2—are direct. This question alone is a little conceptual: Are the 3 empowering policies defined and published?

For IT Ops teams, answering this question means checking whether these three policies are written down, made visible, and backed by management:

• How users request help: Is there a clear, official process (e.g., tickets) for requesting support?
• What counts as an emergency: Has the organization defined what truly qualifies as urgent, and communicated it?
• What is supported: Is the scope of service (who, what, where, when) defined so the team can fairly say “yes” or “no”?

If these policies exist only informally, or if exceptions are made so often that the policies don’t carry weight, the answer is no. If they’re documented, published, and enforced, the answer is yes.

Why does the Ops Report Card work so well?

The answer is its simplicity—it zeroes in on the basics every IT team needs to run reliably. When one of those basics is missing, it usually triggers bigger downstream problems. The checklist makes those gaps visible and points to root causes instead of just surface symptoms.

It’s also designed to be collaborative—something managers and practitioners can go through together—which builds shared understanding. And since each question comes with context and resources, it’s not just a scorecard, it’s a guide for what to do next.

📚Also read: How to identify automatable processes in IT

Try Stitchflow’s free—and interactive—Ops Report Card

Since launching Stitchflow's version of the Ops Report Card, we've seen IT leaders, solo sysadmins, and engineers use it with genuine excitement. That's the kind of response that excites us as well.

Have feedback or ideas for other free tools that could make IT operations smoother? We'd love to hear from you. Reach out at contact@stitchflow.io—we're always looking for ways to help IT teams work smarter.

Next steps: Acting on your Ops Report Card scores

Once you finish the assessment on Stitchflow, you'll get your score out of 32 along with a clear list of practices you haven't implemented yet. Now comes the important part: turning that insight into meaningful improvement.

Here's how to move forward strategically.

• Start with the biggest gaps: Don’t try to fix all 32 items at once. Identify the missing practice that’s causing the most pain or creating downstream problems, and address that first.
• Build incrementally: Maturity takes time. Choose one or two practices to implement each quarter, get them working reliably, measure the impact, then move on. Sustainable progress beats short-lived sprints.
• Turn your score into a conversation: Share results with your team and leadership. A score of 18/32 isn’t failure—it’s a baseline. It gives everyone a shared language for discussing maturity and deciding where to invest next.
• Use automation as a multiplier: Many checklist items highlight IT workflow automation because it’s what lets teams scale. Start with repetitive tasks—provisioning, patching, backups—to save time and cut errors.

Finally, revisit the checklist every 6–12 months. Track improvements, celebrate progress, and adjust priorities. The goal isn’t perfection, but a solid foundation that makes operations more reliable, responsive, and less reactive.

👉Try the free Stitchflow Automation Gap Checker to see if you’ve automated 100% of your SaaS user and access management.

How Stitchflow closes your SaaS management gaps

The Ops Report Card gives IT teams a clear-eyed benchmark of where their practices stand. But scoring yourself is just the first step—closing the gaps is where maturity really happens. That’s where Stitchflow comes in.

Stitchflow helps IT teams act on their checklist results by tackling the hardest-to-fix blind spots in SaaS management—disconnected apps, unmanaged accounts, and manual offboarding processes. Here’s how:

• Close offboarding gaps: If the scorecard flags “no” on rapid account disablement, Stitchflow automates deprovisioning across every app, even those without SSO or SCIM.
• Automate access control: Instead of manual spreadsheets, Stitchflow keeps a real-time view of every user, license, and app so you can finally answer “yes” to asset and fleet tracking.
• Eliminate hidden risks: Security and disaster-prep scores improve when orphaned and unused accounts are found and remediated automatically—no tickets or scripts required.
• Stay audit-ready: For maturity checks on documentation and compliance, Stitchflow continuously generates evidence, removing the manual effort from user access reviews.

In other words, if the Ops Report Card shows you what’s missing in SaaS management, Stitchflow helps you automate the fixes—sustainably, at scale, and without drowning in manual work.

👉 Book a demo to see how Stitchflow helps you turn your Ops Report Card “no’s” into “yes’s”—with full visibility, automated cleanup, and audit-ready reporting.