As part of the CESSDA SaW (Strengthening and Widening) project a capability development model (CDM) was instigated to aid current and aspiring service providers to participate in CESSDA to their maximum ability: some partners have a long history and have set high ambitions and funding, whereas other partners are in the process of setting up their archives, sometimes with limited funding. Rather than setting fixed requirements for each service and provider within an infrastructure, the CDM can be used to define both the organisation’s desired state and provide effective guidance on how to improve services that form part of the infrastructure gradually, initially to the minimal and then, to the desired state for the service provider. The CDM can be adapted to other infrastructural contexts in the social sciences and humanities. In this this presentation we will show the model, discuss how it can be used to identify gaps in service provision as well as managed improvements. Furthermore, we will consider how it could be adapted for use in other distributed infrastructures, or used in tandem with other maturity models (such as CESSDA’s software maturity matrix), plus future developments of the model.