Build your own maturity assessment
“We need to assess our Agile maturity. Is there any maturity model that we can use?”
This is the question that many organisations that are in their journey of Agile transformation will ask eventually. And to find the answer, usually, the organisation will seek the answer from outside to see what the existing assessment tools/models they can use. And, they probably can find a lot. Some of them will even provide the report to tell how mature the organisation is compared to the others. But, based on what I observed, most of those assessments are the checklist of the things that the organisation are expected to do, such as if a specific activity is happening or not, if an expected behaviour is existing or not, etc. In my own opinion, those kinds of assessments can not really assess how agile an organisation is. Because the things they are checking are just what may help the organisation achieve agility but not the direct measurement of the agility itself. It is like we try to assess if a person is healthy or not, instead of examing the body directly, we ask what they are eating every day, how long they sleep every night, and how often they do exercises. Sure if a person is living in such a healthy way, it is likely that she/he will be healthy. But, can we be hundred per cent sure that person is absolutely healthy? I don’t think we can just say that.
So, how can we answer this question since the transformation is a big investment to any organisation? Actually, there is a simple way to find the answer.
Before we discuss how to assess agility, let’s step back and discuss what agility means. If we go back to the origin, what does agile mean? This is the definition from the Agile Alliance website.
The ability to create and respond to change in order to succeed in an uncertain and turbulent environment
And this ability includes three critical capabilities.
- Be able to build the right thing
- Be able to build it right
- Be able to build it fast
For any organisation, to measure how agile they are, they should ask the following questions to themselves.
- How do we know if we are building the right thing?
- How do we know if we are delivering it with good quality?
- How do we know if we are delivering at an expected speed?
And the answers to those questions should exist within the organisation rather than out of the organisation.
How do we know if we are building the right thing?
To measure if the organisation is building the right thing, the metrics should come from how the organisation will measure their business success. It could be the growth of profit, customer NPS, marketing share, number of active users, etc. It is the measurement of the effectiveness of the business. The challenge to the organisation is to identify the key metrics that matter to the core business growth which can drive the improvement of effectiveness. And also, they may change if the organisation shifts the strategic business focus.
How do we know if we are delivering it with good quality?
Depending on what product or service the organisation is offering to their customer, the answers to this question can be different. To a software product company, the quality can be measured by the downtime of the product, the number of product issues, etc. To a service company, the quality can be measured by the number of customers complaints, the customer NPS, the customer satisfaction score, etc.
It is also worth being aware that the quality may include both external and internal quality. The above metrics are measuring the external quality that the customer can feel directly. We may also need to measure the internal quality (the “built-in” quality). For example, the quality of software code, the engineering quality of a car, etc.
The organisation should identify the quality metrics that are relevant to its product or service and continually track the quality data to provide a better product or service to its customer.
How do we know if we are delivering at an expected speed?
Same with the measurement of quality, the measurement of delivery speed (aka productivity or efficiency) will depend on what the organisation is delivering. There are lots of industry-standard measurements that can use, such as cycle time, lead time, throughput, etc. The organisation can also define their own measurement based on its business.
If an organisation can figure out how to answer these three questions in its own business context, they literally have established the way to assess its business agility. It should be easy to understand and be used to drive organisational improvement straightway.
People may ask what the assessments are for Agile mindset, culture, etc. To me, they are critical to helping an organisation to improve its ways of working in order to achieve business agility. But they are not agility itself. If there is a gap between the expected and actual ability, the organisation should figure out what the root cause might be and try to improve and reduce the gap. It may include changing the mindset, culture and practices.
So, to measure the business agility, don’t look outside, instead, look inside!
