Task: Provide teams in an agile transformation process with a tool to assess their maturity on different dimensions of agile working. Allow assessment and derivation of useful next steps and measures to increase joint ownership and team-responsibility.
My roles: Tool Development, Agile Coach (MBA Applied Project)
Skills applied: Agility, Organizational Development, Team Development, Coaching
The applied project of my MBA program gave me the opportunity to work with fellow students on the topic of agile maturity, which was an ongoing task and challenge in all of our respective organizations. We decided to develop a broader model of agile working, covering the aspects of collaboration, mindset, personal skills, leadership styles, decision making, coordination and methods used, allowing a five-level assessment on each of the five dimensions. The validation of the model was conducted in six different organizations across industries and indicated a good level of differentiation in the assessment of individual teams and (subjectively) useful insights into the current working mode and potential areas for improvement
One of the outcomes of our validation was, that teams don't just need a tool for self-assessment, but also wanted to derive suitable measures to improve on the five dimensions if needed. Therefore, we extended our assessment model into a maturity model that contained the various indicators for assessing the five dimensions, but also provided examples of what "good" would look like in each of them, thus allowing to more easily identify the areas for improvement and the intended status to be achieved to move on to the next maturity level. We also provided suitable measures (from our own experiences in agile teams) to develop some of these dimensions towards a target state, which turned out to be useful for teams in order to focus on relevant improvement measures.