
Capacity Planning
Assess capacity each Sprint to understand what the load is on the team versus how much
Agile IQ® Score: 131-165
Companies at this stage of their transformation journey are in the Ha stage of Shu Ha Ri. A Stage Four team has an Agile IQ of 131-165.
Stage Four suggests that most of the company is taking part in agile teams. Most companies have shifted from “ways of working” in teams to agile product management operating models.
Relative to other organisations, Stage Four indicates your overall agile capability maturity is likely very high.
$20M+
Up to 5 days
Up to 7 days
High
It typically takes a company 3-5 years to reach Stage Four. Only 10% of digital transformations reach Stage Four.
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.
In Stage Four, many of the teams in the company have strong agile behaviours. The ones that start to focus on optimising flow will help decrease the company's ability to pivot to disruptive change. Cost savings in Stage Four companies for agile adoption can reach $20M+ per year.
Management by objectives | move to |
Lean practices and measuring value |
Reporting on objectives and tasks | move to |
Reporting on value-based metrics based on the impact and outcome investments have to customers and the conmpany |
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.
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. |
Data on the fastest path to growth, based on other companies' successes and lessons learned, is key to avoid the traps of transformation
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, leave us alone" is a common sign that teams have only implemented agile as a fixed process over a way to continously improve. They might 'appear' to be a Stage Four team, but they're likely to be hiding deeper behavioural problems. |
By the time an enterprise and its teams move into Stage Four, the focus should be on understanding the whole product and the effectiveness of its operating model.
Issues most often occur in Stage Four when:
Integrate WIP, Cycle Time, Throughput, and Work Item Age in experiments of how to improve Time to Market and Ability to Innovate.
Value-based metrics help shift thinking from activity to the impact and outcome of investment in both the product and teams capability to deliver. Value-based metrics must be tied to goals, not deliveravbles or tasks.
Escalating decisions to leadership takes time. Trusted teams should be empowered to make significant decisions within established guardrails.
Adding flow metrics with a focus on the value stream in particular have the following impact:
Flow metrics empower leaders to create highly targetted improvement actions to improve the effectiveness of their agile operating model.
Four flow metrics are essential to improve an understand the state of items in a work system:
Flow metrics are one of the most effective tools to understand how long Features take from idea through to deployment. They are a key metric for executives, managers and agile leaders to understand the flow of work through a value stream.
ARTs benefist from flow metrics include:
Teams benefits from understanding and using flow metrics:
Kanban is a critical tool to capture flow metrics. Ensure metrics are captured throughout the Sprint and used in Retrospectives to:
Focus on Agile IQ® improvement actions that impact:
Work with Scrum Masters on mapping the value stream, its steps, inventory, and cycle time. When the value stream map has been created, assess:
When teams are impacted by impediments but don’t have the influence or power to address them, their Scrum Masters should escalate these issues to management. This helps improve transparency of the factors that impede flow and increase delivery time.
If teams don’t feel safe to highlight these issues, leaders have no visibility of what is impacting delivery speed.
Reinforce the team’s focus on accountability for delivery, but also that they have the support to raise issues knowing they have the support of leadership.
Organisations measure many different kinds of things. Broadly speaking, measures fall into three categories:
The problem most organisations face, which is often reflected in the things they measure, is that measuring activities and outputs is easy, while measuring outcomes is difficult. Organisations may gather a lot of data with insufficient information about their ability to deliver value. However, delivering valuable outcomes to customers is essential if organisations are to reach their goals. For example, working more hours (activities) and delivering more features (outputs) does not necessarily lead to improved customer experiences (outcomes).
EBM provides a set of perspectives on value and the organisation’s ability to deliver value. These perspectives are called Key Value Areas (KVAs). These areas examine the goals of the organization (Unrealised Value), the current state of the organization relative to those goals (Current Value), the responsiveness of the organisation in delivering value (Time-to-Market), and the effectiveness of the organisation in delivering value (Ability-to-Innovate). Focusing on these four dimensions enables organisations to better understand where they are and where they need to go.
Focus on Agile IQ® improvement actions that impact:
Decentralised decision-making is any process where the decision-making authority is distributed throughout teams over executives and middle managers. Decentralisation, if handled correctly, can be powerful. The key is to empower employees to establish autonomy when making business decisions. However, doing this can introduce challenges for leaders and teams.
Decentralised decision-making has the following impacts:
Not all decisions should be decentralised. Some decisions are strategic, have far-reaching impact, and are outside the scope, knowledge, or responsibilities of the teams. In addition, leaders are still accountable for outcomes. They also have the market knowledge, longer-range perspectives, and understanding of the business and financial landscape necessary to steer the enterprise.
Some decisions, then, should be centralised. Generally, they share the following characteristics:
Most decisions do not reach the threshold of strategic importance. All other decisions should be decentralised. Characteristics of these types of decisions include:
Assess capacity each Sprint to understand what the load is on the team versus how much
Optimise flow of work through upgrading the team’s visual board to Kanban
Liberating Structures are easy-to-learn microstructures that enhance relational coordination and trust.
Data tells a compelling story, but helping stakeholders visualise data in meaningful ways creates an impact
Scrum.org (2020). Evidence-Based Management Guide. Measuring value to enable improvement and agility. Online at: https://www.scrum.org/resources/evidence-based-management-guide
Scaled Agile Framework (2022) Principle #9 – Decentralised decision-making. Online at: https://www.scaledagileframework.com/decentralize-decision-making/