There is, at the present time, no model to effectively support context-aware process change in small software organisations. The assessment reference models, for example, SPICE and CMMI, provide a tool for identifying gaps with best practice, but do not take into account group culture and environment, and do not help with prioritisation. These approaches thus do not support the many small software organisations that need to make effective changes that are linked to business objectives in short time periods. In this paper, we propose a model on an analogy of ‘software system as human’ and suggest that we can apply the idea of human health to help identify business objectives and improvement steps appropriate for these objectives. We describe a ‘proof-of-concept’ case study in which the model is retrospectively applied to a process improvement effort with a local software group.