Composability Fitness
Stage Four: Agile IQ® 131-165
Your Composability
Your overall Agile IQ® score puts you at Stage Four Composability. Stage Four suggests that most of the company has shifted to valuing responsiveness over low-risk, predictable execution. At this level of composability, the organisation is highly resilient to disruptive change that can impact both its people’s mental health and the quality of its services and products.
Average time to pivot to change
Up to 7 days
Forecast cost savings
$20M+
Average time to release value
Up to 5 days
Forecast psychological safety
High
It typically takes a company 3-5 years to reach Stage Four. Only 10% of business transformations reach Stage Four.
What is Stage Four?
Stage Four organisations are high performers. Their teams regularly show consistent high throughput at a high level of quality and sustainable pace. Stage Four companies’ are resilient because they are highly attuned to their business environment – they simply adapt quickly, reprioritise tactics, and continue delivery with very little interruption.
What to avoid
86% of business transformations fail. Don't make decisions based on "gut instinct". Base growth on data that compares you to other companies and their successful actions for improvement. Agile IQ® provides you with this data.
| Groupthink | avoid |
Groupthink is a real danger for teams that rapidly reach this stage. They internalise their sense of superiority and end up slipping back to Stage Two if they aren't kept an eye on. |
| "But we deliver!" | avoid |
"But we deliver!" is a common cry from teams that have only implemented agile in name only (faux agile) over a way to continously improve. They might 'appear' to be a Stage Four team, but they're likely to be hiding deeper problems and change resistance. |
Archetypal behaviours
Your Agile IQ® score suggests that many of the teams in your company have strong agile behaviours and composability fitness. Their ability to pivot and adapt to disruptive change with little impact to delivery will depend on their ability to optimise end-to-end flow of their value stream.
Cost savings in Stage Four companies for agile adoption can reach $20M+ per year.
| Management by objectives and cost leadership at scale | move to |
Lean practices, measuring value, and executives driving investment funding over yearly project budgeting cycles |
| Reporting on objectives and tasks | move to |
Reporting on value-based metrics based on the impact and outcome investments have to customers and the company, e.g.: product usage index, customer satisfaction gap, product cost ratio, market share. |
| Technology automation drives efficiency and scale | move to |
Composable technologies enable multiple outcomes simultaneously |
Key to growth
Your Agile IQ® score suggests that while there is likely agile capability growth across your company, there may still be some competing priorities holding you back from resilience to change.
| Flow | actions for growth |
Use value stream maps to understand bottlenecks in the flow of value to customers and take actions to remove them. |
| Waste | actions for growth |
Aggressively assess whether processes and practices add value to customers and, if not, how they can be removed. |
| Metrics | actions for growth |
Heavy use of value metrics will see a focus on why investment is being made and a focus on its impact over a "tick and flick" approach to delivery of features. |
Agile IQ® gives you real comparison data for composability fitness
- One assessment
- Instant comparisons to other companies of a similar age
- AI insights to inform business transformations decisions and capability improvement
Cost savings modelling
Track cost savings trends as Agile IQ® increases.
Time to pivot faster
See how you rate against other companies.
Throughput trends
Track cost savings trends as Agile IQ® increases.
