Measuring agile behaviour

How do you measure a behaviour and mindset?

Understanding behaviour needs the science of psychology.

Agile IQ®’s AI with machine learning understands the statistical correlation between behaviours, traits, and mindset, and business outcomes, such as improved flow of value and decreased costs. As certain behaviours get stronger, business results improve.

All it takes is one assessment, and you can compare your teams’ behaviours against others at a similar stage in their agile journey.

Agile IQ® maturity model measures behaviours

  • Agile IQ® compares your behaviours to 5 sets of capability archetypes.
  • Get insights and benchmarks on where you are.
  • Get advice on what behaviours you should be  focussing on to improve and get better business impacts and customer outcomes.
athletics-team-running

Behaviour-based

Links assessments of behaviours, and business outcomes, to improvement actions you can track through Jira.

travel-map-finger

Non-linear model

Assesses the behaviours that are strongest, not a team survey of subjective actions.

technology-chip-hold

AI-driven

Ensures insights on behaviours are objective, scalable, and repeatable best practice.

Stage One is a focus on efficiency

Agile IQ: 0-48 / 200

  • Delivery typically depends on talented people
  • Skills are often embedded in specific individuals
  • Scaling agility is difficult and good practices are often not yet  repeatable.

In Stage One, companies typically don’t see a lot of returns:

  • Cost reduction: None
  • Improved throughput: None
  • Faster to market: None

‘Agile in Name Only’ is often the term used to describe companies that just tweak at the edges of their processes. If your Agile IQ benchmarking doesn’t show any improved throughput or time to market, it’s likely you are indeed at Stage One. 

Stage Two companies focus on adapting to change

Agile IQ: 49-92 / 200

 

  • Strongly invested in mastering the basics
  • 70% of teams start with Scrum as their operating model
  • Establishing consistency of roles and practices is key

Stage Two beds down the essential aspects of inspecting progress on at least a monthly basis and adapting forecasts, milestones and plans. The rythm of the Sprint helps teams to get into the habit of adapting to change when they need to, when they get feedback, and when their delivery plans don’t turn out right.

In Stage Two, companies start to see some returns:

  • Cost reduction: approx $5M / yr
  • Average time to release value: Often more than 1 / mth
  • Average time to pivot to change: Up to 3 mths or more

Establishing agile roles and aligning with industry standards is key at this stage over trying to customise a range of patterns and practices the organisation is not yet fully proficient with.

Stage Three companies learn to be responsive to customers

Agile IQ: 93-130 / 200

 

  • Focussing on strengthenning use of Sprint Review to elicit regular feedback from customers, their context and adapt to their needs
  • Shifting from project management to product management practices and frameworks
  • Shifting from project management metrics to value: business impact and customer outcomes

In Stage Three, companies start to see significant business impacts:

  • Cost reduction: approx $10M+ / yr
  • Average time to release value: Up to 2 weeks
  • Average time to pivot to change: Up to 30 days

 

Stage Four companies are resilient in the face of disruptive change

Agile IQ: 131-165 / 200

Stage Four companies and their teams are typically focussed on:

  • Flow metrics and value stream management, improving throughput, cycle time, the amount of work in-progress, work item age.
  • Agile OKRs on product development and not on individual people or teams against teams that create competition over alignment to a common product outcome.
  • Heavy use of Kanban and Lean to understand bottlenecks in the flow of value and actively maximise throughput from idea through to delivery.

Stage Four organisations are high performers. Their teams regularly show consistent high throughput at a high level of quality and sustainable pace. It shouldn’t be unusual for their teams to double their throughput when the type of work is consistent over a few months.

Stage Four companies typically see the following impacts and outcomes from their ongoing investment in agile capability maturity:

  • Average time to pivot to change: down to approx. 7days
  • Cost reduction: ~$20M+
  • Average time to release value: up to 5 days

 

Stage Five companies adapt and pivot for their own benefit

Agile IQ: 165-200 / 200

In Stage Five, companies continuously improve their capability with a focus on:

  • Systems Thinking to better understand and improve the whole value stream.
  • Supporting teams to take more of a leadership role and higher levels of responsibilitiesfor supporting each other and growing enterprise agility.
  • Nurturing their network of teams over the company’s hierarchy.

Stage Five companies are global leaders. They have an aggressive focus on the customer and their needs and making rapid decisions through their network of team over the hierarchy. Stage Five teams have a ‘systems thinking’ mindset and operate to optimise the whole value stream. 

Stage Five companies are rare. They actively and continuously invest in agile capability maturity because their data reinforces the ongoing benefits it gives to business impacts and customer outcomes:

  • Psychological safety: very high
  • Cost reduction: ~$30M+
  • Customer NPS: ~80+

AI with real benchmarking and comparison data

  • AI insights to inform digital transformations decisions and capability improvement
  • One behavioural assessment
  • Instant comparisons to other companies of a similar age
agile iq master screens (all) 2022-06-15 003

Cost savings modelling

Track cost savings trends as Agile IQ increases.

Time to release value

See how you rate against other companies.

Throughput trends

Track cost savings trends as Agile IQ increases.

AI-driven business agility
24/7

Get started with Agile IQ® with 10 days free!

agile iq academy logo 2022-05-05 sm

Enter your details

search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close