While being an agile coach, many have come asking me to define the agile maturity level and create agile maturity tools. It’s always sensible to want to know what return we will be getting on the investment. Adapting agile costs money, so it is common sense if anyone wants to know what the cost and what will be the possible cost reduction of adopting agile is. To know this it is also a sense to monitor progress. In agile, many businesses use agile maturity metrics to understand their present agile progress and practices for improving them further.
As said, “cost is more important than quality but quality is the best way to reduce cost.” It is also advisable to measure the agile quality of the enterprise and act further to improve it and reduce the cost for the enterprise. By knowing when our agile adoption can end we can also ensure when to lower or dissolve funding required for agile transformation. But how we will know what our organization's agile maturity level is?
Many organizations have already taken training in agile and implemented it in some departments. But still, they are unable to define what their agile maturity level is. The agile maturity level can also be measured by self-developed assessment. But most time it’s like a challenge for organizations as they are unable to understand where to start and where they stand. So it is wise to use agile maturity measurement to evaluate their maturity level. To ease all the doubts today I will help you to know some assessment ways of agile maturity measurement.
Maturity Level
First, we will start by knowing how many levels are there for agile maturity.
Level 0- There is no capacity in the team or organization at this level.
Level 1- Team members have basic knowledge of agile from books and articles but have not yet applied it in practice.
Level 2- Team members have some knowledge from books and articles and also try to apply it practically.
Level 3- Teams know the practices and principles and also use them regularly.
Level 4- Team are getting more advance and trying to measure their abilities and efficiencies.
Level 5- Teams understand agile better and start experimenting with practices and using metrics to measure their effects.
In general, there are 9 assessment areas defined for measurements but a required organization can also add some other areas for themselves.
Main Assessment Areas for Agile Maturity Measurement
Quality Advocacy
Technical Craftsmanship
User Experience
Product Ownership
Teams Dynamics
Risk Management
Organizational Support
Change Management
Project Management
While defining the assessment questions make sure that every area is covered in it as any single area missed will lead to incomplete measurement.
When I go for an agile maturity measurement assessment I make sure to have two basic questions in mind:
Is more value being delivered?
Are we improving the way we are delivering value?
So the metrics used in agile maturity measurement are
Customer satisfaction
Performance of delivery process
When we go with customer satisfaction, we go for our product's impact on customers’ behavior as a good product will make certain things in customers. To use our product change in customers will be seen. The behavior change will be measurable. The collected data from this will be valuable and real, as the impact measure is outside the development team.
When comes to delivery process performance, it is essential as it goes with knowing how good our performance is at creating a product. But we also resist measuring performance in metrics of cost use quality, speed, predictability etcetera for the task.
Agile Maturity Assessment Types
It is not required to have all the assessments as big affairs in an organization it can vary at various modes which are
Self-assessment- Teams can have a periodic assessment. This one is the most used in our teams as we love having a tag of our progress.
Peer assessment- Peers review the assessment of the team providing objective snaps.
Full assessment- It gives an established baseline profile for progress measurement.
The more the organizations are going through agile transformation more they are getting aware of knowing where they are standing in the transformation and the more they are valuing agile maturity measurement as they understand the statement “you need to know exactly where you stand in business at all times. Measure everything, because everything that is measured and watched improves.”
About Advance Agility
We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting, and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium, and large organizations across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients and move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting the human-centric approach to business agility. Embracing change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with an End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitors.
Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. Please write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.
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