We present a meta-model as a process maturity framework that can be effectively used to identify the key practices to initiate and sustain a software process improvement effort focused on a single process area. Our approach moves away from the overall software development process and computation of maturity levels and focuses on a particular process area or task and its key practices. In determining process maturity our framework takes into account not only the process dimension but also the quality and usability of the products or deliverables of the process. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed meta-model by generating key practices for several software process areas and tasks including system documentation, quality assurance and configuration management. We show that our approach is able to identify a complete set of key practices to assess a process and generate recommendations that facilitate the development of an action plan for the software process improvement effort.