Agile Maturity
Agile IQ®: 0-48/1200
Agile IQ of 0-48/200 puts you in Stage One . Stage One suggests that you have a number of people focussed on business transformation, but relative to other organisations at a similar stage in their journey, your overall ability to adapt effectively to change and be resilient is likely still fairly low.
Up to 6 months or more
None
Once a year
Very low
Stage One organisations are typically efficient. They rely on talented people to spring into action when change impacts the organisation. Unfortunately, because this capability isn’t embedded beyond specific individuals, a company’s agility isn’t yet scalable and success isn’t repeatable.
Starting with guardrails for self-management is a critical first step. Leadership should begin by moving from a plan-driven, approval based governance processes to a framework that supports distributed, emergent, and empirical decision-making. Decision-latency is a key factor in improving a company’s ability to adapt rapidly to change.
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.
| Team design | avoid |
Functional, single capability (e.g., a B.A. Team, a Test Team, etc.) or component teams. |
| Self-organisation | avoid |
Autonomous teams. Promote self-organisation through management establishing guardrails: alignment of purpose to product goals, alignment to a set of quality standards (e.g. consistent Definition of Done), and a common set of minimum rules. Scrum is a good place to start. |
| Cargo cult | avoid |
Assuming the symbols of agile make teams agile. Only a change in the way teams work will deliver the organisation the benefits of agile: reduced costs, improved productivity, reduced risk through improved transparency. |
Your Agile IQ® score suggests that you may have traditional management behaviours in place over guardrails for self-management. Self-management enables faster decision-making and improved adaptability and responsiveness to change.
| Plan-driven, approval-based governance | move to |
Guardrails for self-management with set timeboxes, minimum agile roles, potentially releasable increment every Sprint. |
| Ad-hoc or waterfall practices | move to |
Cross-functional teams that can deliver outcomes without needing to rely on upstream or downstream teams to provide an increment of value. |
| Efficiency | move to |
Flexibility |
Your Agile IQ® score suggests that while there is some agile growth across your company, there may still be some competing priorities holding you back from improving your agility to adapt effectively to change.
| Self-organising teams | actions for growth |
Executives and managers must establish and promote guardrails for self-organisation. Agile needs to become the company's operating model. |
| Architecture | actions for growth |
Move from conventional enterprises services to composable, low-code, no-code services. |
| Improve the transparency of work | actions for growth |
Employ team backlogs over project gantt charts are a good place to start. |
Track cost savings trends as Agile IQ® increases.
See how you rate against other companies.
Track throughput and lead time as your business agility improves.
