Stages of Agile Maturity

Stage Four teams are high performers. They should regularly show consistent high throughput at a high level of quality and sustainable pace. It shouldn’t be unusual for these teams to double their throughput when the type of work is consistent over a few months.

Archetypal behaviours seen in this stage:

• Optimising delivery through Lean practices.
• Agile OKRs and Evidence Based Management.
• Heavy use of metrics to learn, make decisions, experiment, and improve.

Focus for growth:

• Flow.
• Understanding, identifying and removing waste.
• Optimising throughput and quality.

Things to 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, leave us alone” is a common sign that the team has 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.