Agile IQ®: Transformation Academy™
Agile capability maturity
Agile Stages of Maturity
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.
There are distinct sets of behaviours that strengthen as a team becomes more agile. While their growth in these behaviours is not linear, it does follow a predictable pattern of development and team evolution.
Stage One: 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:
- Deployment Frequency: once per 100+ days
- Throughput: < 6 items per Sprint per team
- Lead Time for changes: 180+ days
- Mean time to recovery: 180+ days
- Change failure rate: 30%
- Psychological safety: Very low
- Cost reduction impacts: None.
- Forecast NPS: < 0
- Forecast eNPS: < 0
‘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.
Archetypal behaviours seen in this stage
| Management by task delegation | move to |
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. |
| Optimising for utilisation | move to |
100% utilisation doesn't mean people are working on the most valuable thing. Ensure teams are effective at delivering work to a standard level of quality that is "potentially" releasable to users and/or stakeholders, not just being 100% utilised. |
Keys to growth
| 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. |
| Agile IQ® ROI metrics | actions for growth |
Use data, not gut instinct, to make informed decisions on where to focus capability development. |
| Improve the transparency of work | actions for growth |
Employ team backlogs over project gantt charts are a good place to start. |
Stage Two: Adapting
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 rhythm 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:
- Deployment Frequency: 2x per 100+ days
- Throughput: < 50 items per Sprint per team
- Lead Time for changes: 7 days
- Mean time to recovery: 24 hours
- Change failure rate: 20%
- Psychological safety: Medium
- Cost reduction impacts: $10M+ / yr
- Forecast NPS: < 40
- Forecast eNPS: < 15
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.
Archetypal behaviours seen in Stage Two
| Customising practices | move to |
Learning the fundamentals before your company starts customising it doesn't yet have any experience with. |
| Customising roles and titles | move to |
Alignment to industry standards with new words that will help create change |
| Creating an overly complex company-wide "agile methodology" | move to |
Keeping things simple |
Keys to growth
| Ensure key agile roles are in place | actions for growth |
Understand the role off managers versus Product Owners and Scrum Masters. Ensure minimal agile roles are supported. |
| Changing digital practices | actions for growth |
Learning mindset. Focus team leads and capability managers on improving the company's capabilities over directing and task managing them. |
| Focus on teams | actions for growth |
Self-organisation with guardrails established by management |
| Create consistency | actions for growth |
Creating consistency of practice and terminology so that everyone has a shared understanding of how work is now delivered |
Stage Three: Responsive
Agile IQ: 93-130 / 200
- Focussing on strengthening 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:
- Deployment Frequency: 2x per 100+ days
- Throughput: Up to 50 items per Sprint per team
- Lead Time for changes: 7 days
- Mean time to recovery: 24 hours
- Change failure rate: 20%
- Psychological safety: Medium
- Cost reduction impacts: $10M+ / yr
- Forecast NPS: < 40
- Forecast eNPS: < 15
Archetypal behaviours seen in this stage
| Project Management | move to |
Product Management |
| Stakeholder requirements | move to |
"Customer first" mindset |
| Measuring efficiency and milestone based deliverables | move to |
Measuring value, impact and outcomes |
Keys to growth
| Explore additional practices | actions for growth |
Add DevOps, Design Thinking, Kanban, and XP on top of Scrum |
| Evolve to Product Management | actions for growth |
Avoid reinforcing traditional project management behaviours and practices. |
| Alignment and Cadence | actions for growth |
For scaled agile initiatives and agile release trains, ensure all teams are Sprinting and aligned so that the whole company can also "Sprint". |
Stage Four: Resilient
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:
- Deployment Frequency: 1-2x per Sprint
- Throughput: Up to 70 items per Sprint per team
- Lead Time for changes: 1-2 days
- Mean time to recovery: 12 hours
- Change failure rate: 19%
- Psychological safety: High
- Cost reduction impacts: $20M+ / yr
- Forecast NPS: < 70
- Forecast eNPS: < 30
Archetypal behaviours seen in this stage
| 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 company |
Keys to growth
| 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. |
Stage Five: Composable
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:
- Deployment Frequency: 1+ per day
- Throughput: Up to 80+ items per Sprint per team
- Lead Time for changes: < 1 per day
- Mean time to recovery: 7 hours
- Change failure rate: 15%
- Psychological safety: Very high
- Cost reduction impacts: $30M+ / yr
- Forecast NPS: ~ 80+
- Forecast eNPS: ~ 50+
Archetypal behaviours seen in this stage
| Teams optimise for its own outcomes | move to |
The team sacrifices its own needs over the needs of the whole value stream. |
| Continuous improvement | move to |
Product management actively invests in capability improvement. |
| Individual OKRs | move to |
Product based OKRs and KPIs with teams' goal aligned to contributing to those. |
Keys to growth
| Agile leadership | actions for growth |
Executives and managers should lead by example and work in executive agile teams. |
| Agile capability management | actions for growth |
Invest in improving time to market and ability to innovate as part of the improvement of products and creating capability to enter new markets. |
| Inspecting/adapting cycle for OKRs | actions for growth |
Employ Sprint Reviews and quarterly review cycles on inspecting progress toward OKRs and adapting initiatives to ensure these are reached. |
Building Agile Behaviours and Mindset
Four key behaviours are paramount to building an agile enterprise: self organisation, agile values, continuous learning culture, and sprinting.
As these behaviours become stronger, enterprise agile outcomes grow, including lower costs and faster time to deliver, while maintaining high quality standards.
Working with agile roles
Agile roles are distinct from project management roles and responsibilities. They focus on value, long-lived teams, and specialist roles like Scrum Masters to help build effective agile teams.
Learn to work with agile frameworks
Agile roles are distinct from project management roles and responsibilities. They focus on value, long-lived teams, and specialist roles like Scrum Masters to help build effective agile teams.
