Agile maturity assessments measure how effectively your team uses Agile practices. They’re valuable because you can determine where your team is strong and where it needs to improve. I’ve seen teams double their productivity by performing these maturity assessments.
You’ll learn about your processes, collaboration, and ability to deliver. So are you ready to find out where your team is at?
Understanding Agile Maturity Assessment
An Agile maturity assessment evaluates how effectively a team or organization is following Agile principles and practices. It measures how well Agile processes are working, where Agile processes are failing, and where teams can improve to achieve a higher level of Agile proficiency.
The purpose of an Agile maturity assessment is to evaluate where your team is at in its Agile journey. It gives you a snapshot of where you are today and helps you define goals for future improvement. This step is critical for organizations that want to get the most value from Agile methodologies.
Key elements of an Agile maturity assessment include evaluating team collaboration, product ownership, technical practices, and continuous improvement. Most of these assessments use a standardized model or framework to ensure consistency and comparability.
The primary benefits of conducting Agile maturity assessments on a regular basis are:
- Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your Agile implementation
- Setting specific improvement objectives
- Tracking improvement over time
- Getting everyone on the same page about which Agile initiatives are most important
- Improving the overall results of a project and the overall team’s performance
I’ve seen Agile maturity assessments completely change teams. They offer a structured way to improve and enable teams to direct their improvement efforts to the areas that will make the biggest impact.
Common Agile Maturity Models
There are several Agile maturity models, each with a slightly different emphasis and approach. Here are a few of the most common options:
The Agile Maturity Model (AMM) evaluates practice, approach, results, collaboration, and culture. It offers a holistic view of an organization’s Agile maturity.
The Agile Scaling Maturity Model (ASMM) is designed specifically for assessing the maturity of scaling Agile practices across an entire organization, considering factors like leadership, team, and inter-team.
The Scrum Maturity Model is a specific maturity model for assessing Scrum teams. It evaluates how well the team is using the roles, events, and artifacts.
The Agile Scaling Knowledgebase (ASK) Matrix is a tool for assessing the maturity of an organization scaling Agile practices. It looks at organizational structure, engineering practices, and product.
These maturity models vary in their focus and level of complexity:
- The AMM is the most comprehensive, but it can be overwhelming for beginners.
- The ASMM is great if you need to scale Agile practices across an entire enterprise.
- The Scrum Maturity Model is the ideal model for assessing the maturity of Scrum teams.
- The ASK Matrix is a helpful option for scaling agile practices across an organization.
The right choice for you will depend on the size of your organization, your experience with Agile, and your specific goals. In general, I recommend starting with the simplest maturity model and working your way up to more advanced models as you become more mature in your Agile journey.
Levels of Agile Maturity
Agile maturity is commonly ranked in five levels, which are essentially the stages of an organization’s Agile journey.
The Initial level indicates ad-hoc processes and minimal Agile expertise. Teams in this level may use a few Agile practices, but there isn’t a consistent application of Agile.
The Exploring level illustrates teams beginning to apply more Agile practices. They realize the benefits of Agile, but they still struggle to apply all practices consistently.
The Defining level demonstrates a consistent application of Agile. Teams have defined Agile processes and are working to improve them.
The Scaling level indicates organizations that have successfully adopted Agile across multiple teams. Therefore, their focus is coordinating and aligning teams.
The Optimizing level is the highest maturity because organizations are continuously optimizing their Agile processes and have designed them to change.
These levels serve as a maturity model for Agile. In my experience, most teams either fall into the Initial or Exploring level, and with some effort and dedication, they can move through the levels.
Key Areas of Agile Maturity Assessment
When evaluating an organization’s Agile maturity, we consider several key factors:
Leadership and culture: Leadership and culture are the foundation of Agile success. This factor evaluates how effectively the leadership team reinforces Agile values and promotes an agile culture across the organization.
Team structure and collaboration: This factor evaluates how the teams are structured and how effectively they collaborate. We also consider cross-functional teams and self-organizing teams.
Product ownership and backlog management: This factor evaluates the effectiveness of communicating and managing the product vision and strategy. We also consider the quality of the backlog, prioritization and stakeholder involvement.
Development practices and technical excellence: This factor evaluates the coding standard, test automation and other technical excellence practices that enable the team to be successful with Agile.
Planning and estimation: This factor evaluates the team’s ability to plan and provide accurate estimates. This includes sprint planning, release planning and capacity utilization.
Continuous integration and delivery: This factor evaluates how quickly and reliably teams can deliver software. We also assess the use of automation, deployment processes and release frequency.
QA and testing: This factor evaluates how teams ensure quality is built into the development process. This includes test-driven development, automated testing and defect management.
Metrics and reporting: This factor evaluates how the teams measure and communicate progress and performance to the business. This includes using agile metrics and making data-driven decisions.
Conducting an Agile Maturity Assessment
To conduct an Agile maturity assessment, do the following:
- Define the assessment scope and objectives
Select the most relevant maturity model
Collect data via surveys, interviews, and observations - Analyze the data and score each category
- Review the results with the team and stakeholders
- Create an improvement plan based on the results
- Self-assessment options include team surveys, retrospectives, and internal compliance audits.
- These options are cost effective, though you won’t have an unbiased opinion.
External assessment options are hiring Agile coaches or a consulting company. They’re unbiased and often provide insights that you can’t get on your own.
Many different agile estimation tools are available, from basic spreadsheets to advanced software specifically designed for Agile maturity assessments.
Ensure you collect accurate data by using a representative sample, creating a psychologically safe environment, and using a mix of quantitative and qualitative data collection methods.
Combining periodic external reviews with self-assessment is often the best strategy to receive the most comprehensive and actionable results.
Interpreting Agile Maturity Assessment Results
Understanding your assessment scores is important if you want to improve. Most maturity models score each dimension as a numerical or categorical score.
Compare scores from different dimensions to identify strengths and weaknesses. Then, look for any patterns or trends that suggest broader systemic issues or opportunities.
Rank dimensions to improve based on their impact and effort required to fix them. This is particularly important if you’re using multiple maturity models at once.
Set achievable goals to improve. For example, it’s unrealistic to improve maturity by two levels in a month or launch a program immediately that improves maturity by three levels. Improving just one maturity level requires a significant amount of effort over time.
When presenting maturity assessment results to business stakeholders, focus on how maturity impacts business outcomes. For example, improving from a stage 2 to stage 3 on Agile maturity might improve product quality, time-to-market or customer satisfaction.
Strategies for Improving Agile Maturity
Creating an improvement plan is the first step to increasing Agile maturity. This plan should detail specific steps, owners, and timelines.
If you notice leadership and cultural issues, help educate and coach the leaders on their role in supporting Agile.
If you identify team collaboration and communication issues, focus on promoting more transparency, trust, open communication, etc. You can also use team-building activities and collaboration tools.
If you identify technical practices and quality assurance issues, the solution might be more training, pair programming, automation tools, etc. Encourage the team to invest in continuous learning and allow time for experimentation.
If you notice product ownership and backlog issues, consider clarifying the role of the product owner, improving the backlogs refining process, increasing stakeholder engagement, etc.
If you don’t see a culture of continuous improvement, the solution might be as simple as helping the team implement regular retrospectives, track action items, and encourage a culture of experimentation.
In my experience, the key to effective improvement is simply making sure you see the improvement each week. Small, consistent improvements are typically all it takes for a team to see a significant change over time.
Case Studies: Successful Agile Maturity Improvements
Larger enterprise transformation: A financial services company increased its Agile maturity level over a two-year period through leadership training, restructuring teams, and investing in technical practices. As a result, they increased their product delivery speed by 30% and saw higher customer satisfaction.
Smaller team optimization: A software startup leveraged Agile maturity assessment to improve a few key things. Specifically, they learned how to improve their product ownership and backlog management. As a result, they decreased rework by 50% and aligned their backlog more closely with customer needs in just six months.
Key takeaways from these use cases included the importance of leadership buy-in, patience and persistence (as Agile improvement is a journey, not a quick win), and the value of celebrating small wins.
The most common challenges included resistance to change, tracking progress (or lack thereof), and sustaining motivation over time. These challenges were ultimately solved through effective communication, setting achievable goals, and regular check-ins to ensure people stayed focused.
Measuring the Impact of Agile Maturity Improvement
Productivity and efficiency KPIs (velocity, cycle time, throughput): These tell you how quickly and efficiently teams can deliver value. Quality and customer satisfaction KPIs (defect rates, customer feedback score, NPS): These tell you how Agile practices impact product quality and how customers perceive the product. Time to market and responsiveness KPIs (release frequency, feature lead time, pivot based on market feedback): These tell you how quickly you can deliver value and the degree to which you’re building the right things.
Team morale and engagement KPIs (team happiness score, retention, participation in improvement initiatives): These tell you how Agile maturity impacts people. A balanced scorecard approach (considering various metrics across different areas) is the best way to measure the impact of Agile maturity in my experience.
Advanced Agile Maturity Concepts
Scaling Agile: Scaling Agile refers to using Agile principles beyond the team level – often throughout an entire department or even company. This requires thinking about inter-team coordination and alignment of the entire organization.
Agile with other methodologies: Integrating Agile with Lean, DevOps, or other methodologies can make the combined practices more effective. The trick is finding the commonalities and tweaking Agile practices to match your specific situation.
Industry maturity with Agile: Different industries are at different levels of Agile maturity. While Agile methodologies have lots of examples from software development, many other industries – like manufacturing, healthcare, and education – are starting to use Agile and adapt the practices to fit their own use cases.
Future of Agile maturity assessment: AI and machine learning will play a bigger role in analyzing the data. There will be more Agile transformation data analyzed, and using AI as a tool is the next evolution. More focus on business agility, not just IT. More measuring the value of the delivery rather than measuring agility or scrum or kanban practice.
Agile Maturity Assessment Tools and Resources
Common assessment tools include Comparative Agility, Agile Maturity Model Assessment, and TeamRetro, which are structured frameworks you can use to assess Agile maturity.
The Scrum.org Open Assessment and the Agile Self-Assessment are good free options to get you started. Paid options will likely deliver more advanced functionality and customization.
You can assess yourself using the agile manifesto‘s Agile Practices Guide or Mountain Goat Software’ Agile Assessment.
Many Agile consulting firms offer external assessment as a service, where they will come in and evaluate your Agile processes internally. This route offers a deep analysis and expert advice.
For continuous learning, consider online courses from Coursera and edX, attending Agile conferences, and participating in your local Agile meetup.
To get started, use the free self-assessment options and then invest in more advanced assessments as your Agile practice grows. Again, the key is not just to assess but to use the data to make incremental improvements in your Agile journey.
Final Thoughts
The Agile maturity assessment is an excellent resource for organizations looking to improve their Agile maturity and maturity of their teams. Teams can use these assessments to identify strengths and weaknesses and areas to improve through regular maturity assessments. This establishes a culture of continuous improvement and optimization of Agile frameworks.
As you continue your Agile journey, keep in mind that maturity is a journey, not a destination. Continue assessing, learning, and adjusting. The result will be higher efficiency, higher quality products, and happier teams. The journey to becoming truly Agile is difficult, but the rewards are well worth it.
