Agile IQ®: Transformation Academy™
Agile capability maturity
Agile Stages of Maturity
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: Efficient
Stage One suggests that you have a number of people focussed on digital transformation, but relative to other organisations, your overall agile capability maturity is likely still fairly low.
Delivery in Stage One organisations depends on talented people, but because skills are embedded in specific individuals, a company’s agility isn’t yet scalable and success isn’t repeatable.
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 userrs 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: Adaptive
Stage Two companies are typically learning how to support self-managing, cross-functional, agile teams and make the shift from predictive waterfall-style planning to adaptive planning in Sprints. These companies and their teams become “agile” when the basics are truly mastered.
Archetypal behaviours seen in this stage
| 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
Stage Three companies start to see tangible results from your investment in your business transformation. Transparency of the health of your products and services is higher, enabling leaders to make informed decisions on where to invest.
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
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.
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 conmpany |
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
Stage Five suggests that your company has mastered its digital transformation and is engaged in continuous and relentless improvement at a whole ‘systems’ perspective over just teams.
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 capavbility 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.
