1.
Agile Maturity
Fad, Trend or Holy Grail?
Hands-on Agile #4
© Stefan Wolpers • Berlin, November 30th, 2017

2.
Twitter: #HoA4
stefan@age-of-product.com

3.
About the Speaker
Agile Coach, Scrum Master, and Product Owner since 2006:
stefan@age-of-product.com

4.
Why Do Organizations Want to
Become ‘Agile’?
stefan@age-of-product.com

5.
The ‘Why’ Question (1)
“By the end of 2018,
80% of all projects will be agile.”
stefan@age-of-product.com

6.
The ‘Why’ Question (2): Command & Control
21st Century Taylorism:
• Functional silos prevail
• Projects, budgets & initiatives rule
Source: Scientific management (Wikipedia) stefan@age-of-product.com

7.
The ‘Why’ Question (3): C-Level Motivation
Typically named reasons for doing “Agile”:
• Become more efficient
• Deliver more & faster
• Improve predictability
Actual benefits of becoming “Agile”:
• Create learning organizations
• Autonomy, mastery and purpose
• Minimizing risk, improving ROI
stefan@age-of-product.com

8.
1. Is there a destination or just a journey ahead?
2. Are we on the right route?
3. How do we know we’re making progress?
The ‘Why’ Question (4)
stefan@age-of-product.com

9.
Becoming ‘Agile’ in Practice
stefan@age-of-product.com

10.
The Agile Path (1): There’s Plenty of ‘Agile’

11.
The Agile Path (2): Business Agility
Source: Domains of Business Agility stefan@age-of-product.com

12.
The Agile Path (3): Packaged ‘Agile’
Source: SAFe® stefan@age-of-product.com

13.
The Agile Path (4): Agile Onion
Source: What Is Agile?
Processes &
Tools
Practices
Principles
Values
Mindset
This can be adopted
C&C style
This requires
cultural &
organizational
change
Move to a learning
organization
Less powerful,
more visible
More powerful,
less visible
stefan@age-of-product.com

14.
The Agile Path (5): Kniberg’s Scrum Test
stefan@age-of-product.com

15.
The Agile Path (6)
stefan@age-of-product.com

16.
The Agile Path (7): Open Issues?
stefan@age-of-product.com
Benefits of an ‘agile maturity model’:
• Six Sigma or ISO 9000 for ‘Agile?’
• How to measure progress?
• What’s the ROI when moving from project- to product-mode?
• Agile patchwork organization:
• Are happy agile islands acceptable?
• Or: Destination Holacracy?
• How to overcome resistance?

17.
The Survey
stefan@age-of-product.com

18.
The Survey (1)
stefan@age-of-product.com

19.
The Survey (2): Fundamentals
Four Questions:
1. What factors contribute to a team’s growing maturity in agile
practices?
2. What maturity levels do you see at a team level?
3. What factors contribute to becoming an ‘agile’ or a learning
organization?
4. What maturity levels do you see at an organizational level?
Responses: 86
stefan@age-of-product.com

20.
The Survey (3): Preliminary Taxonomy
Agile Maturity Indicators:
1. People: Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose
2. Organizational Excellence
3. Technical Excellence
4. Communication & Collaboration
stefan@age-of-product.com

21.
The Survey (4): Autonomy
Self-organization:
1. Empower teams (Decisions, accountability)
2. Focus on outcome
3. Respect Scrum values (Commitment, focus, openness, respect,
courage.)
4. Safety to raise & discuss issues
5. The team handles its own problems (No scrum mom.)
6. Supporting each other as team members (Bonding.)
7. Holding each other accountable (Agile is a team sport.)
stefan@age-of-product.com

22.
The Survey (5): Autonomy
Accountability (individual):
Choosing tools & devices (e.g. software)
stefan@age-of-product.com

23.
The Survey (6): Mastery
Learning:
• Short feedback loops (User tests, customer development)
• Use of retrospectives
• Continuous team coaching (Guilds, code mentors etc.)
• Stakeholders live up to their responsibilities
• Hands-on experience over credentialism
stefan@age-of-product.com

24.
The Survey (7): Mastery
Competence:
• T-shaped people
• Active knowledge sharing
• Continuous learning,
• No withholding of knowledge
• Knowledge sharing beyond the product and tech realm
• Budget to attend conferences
• Center of Excellence for Agile
stefan@age-of-product.com

25.
The Survey (8): Mastery
Team building:
• Cross-functional teams:
• No dependencies w/ other teams,
• End-to-end delivery capability
• Stable, long-living teams
• Support by an experienced scrum master
stefan@age-of-product.com

26.
The Survey (9): Purpose
Inclusion:
• Product discovery
• Product roadmap creation
• Release planning
stefan@age-of-product.com

27.
The Survey (10): Organizational Excellence
Culture:
• Embrace and celebrate failure (Validate hypotheses by running
experiments)
• Curiosity as a norm
• Undogmatic attitude, live Shu-Ha-Ri
• Transparency:
• Share information and data at all levels,
• No more gated information or information brokers
stefan@age-of-product.com

28.
The Survey (11): Organizational Excellence
Leadership:
• Focus on innovation, quality and business value (No more HIPPOism.)
• Supports of ‘agile’s way of working’ fully
• Enforces ‘agile’ as the core of the company culture
• Respect for roles, principles, and processes (The ‘real’ PO.)
stefan@age-of-product.com

29.
The Survey (12): Organizational Excellence
Management:
• Managers to servant leaders
• Trust in people and teams
• Provides tools and facilities necessary to become agile
• Gemba and Kaizen become standard practices
stefan@age-of-product.com

30.
The Survey (13): Organizational Excellence
Organizational design:
• Abandon functional silos for cross-functional teams
• Remove redundant middle management layers (Flatten the hierarchy)
• No more command & control, compliance driven management
• HR aligns with requirements of self-organizing teams
• The organizations morphs into a team of teams
stefan@age-of-product.com

31.
The Survey (14): Organizational Excellence
Clear objectives:
• Shared vision among all actors
• Clear strategy
• Clear priorities
stefan@age-of-product.com

32.
The Survey (15): Organizational Excellence
Business value focus:
• Customer centricity mindset
• Delivering business results
• Shifting the IT focus business needs
• From project budgets to product teams
stefan@age-of-product.com

33.
The Survey (16): Technical Excellence
Engineering level:
• Built-in quality:
• Code reviews,
• TDD:
• Test automation,
• Test coverage
• Pair and mob programming
• Practicing Scrum, Kanban, XP
stefan@age-of-product.com

34.
The Survey (17): Technical Excellence
Process level:
• DevOps: CI, CD (Deployment at will)
• Regular cadence of releases
• Identifying suitable metrics:
• Lead time, cycle time,
• Number of experiments,
• Team health
• Open sourcing code
stefan@age-of-product.com

35.
The Survey (18): Communication & Collaboration
Trust & respect:
• Benefit of the doubt for colleagues
• Safety to disagree
• Honesty
• Candid peer feedback
stefan@age-of-product.com

36.
The Survey (19): Communication & Collaboration
Conflict resolution:
• Constructive disagreement (Disgree, but commit approach.)
• Non-violent communication
stefan@age-of-product.com

37.
The Survey (19): Communication & Collaboration
Collaboration:
• Zero tolerance for political games
• No scripted collaboration
• No incentives to withhold knowledge (Or information.)
• No finger-pointing, no blame-game
stefan@age-of-product.com

38.
What Is Next?
Can we apply analytical thinking
–e.g. measuring factors & calculating a state of agility—
to complex social systems?
stefan@age-of-product.com

39.
Contact Information
Stefan Wolpers
Email: stefan@age-of-product.com
Blog: Age-of-Product.com
Newsletter: https://age-of-product.com/subscribe (Join 12,950 peers)
Slack: https://hands-onagile.slack.com/ (Join 2,100 peers)
Twitter 1: @StefanW
Twitter 2: @AgeOfProduct