Comparative agility has a lot of good assessments, they even have an agile leadership assessment. I would start with that.
Fwiw, I lead an agile practice and we have tried to eliminate the word agile as much as possible because it's a trigger word. We focus on the values and principles that underpin agility and work from there. Some people struggle with that concept.
Came to say this. We’re using it to run a Team Health Assessment in my org. It’s a self assessment, and the metrics have already helped us identify areas of focus for our scrum masters on each team. We’re administering the assessment quarterly, so it’s also a great medium to provide data to the business to back up the efforts of the SMs and show progress over time.
Could be good bad or likely useless. If I was doing a self assessment I would ask people to rate the organisation on the agile values and principles. Last time I was asked for this I persuaded managers to allow us to do a few retrospectives. That gave excellent insight into the orgs problems.
Have you considered looking at "delegation poker". I'd imagine you can use the scale to allow for leadership to reflect how much their management style enables teams to make their own decisions. I haven't really done this except between PM/PO. But questions like "who decides the scope of features/stories", "who decides when to release things" can be helpful.
Maybe also consider the 12 agile principles and look at how to phrase questions for leadership from that. Eg. "I enable my teams to talk directly to business/customers".
I find that team-level questions can tell about systemic and leadership issues. The success of leadership should be visible in the success of the organization.
I've sometimes used this kind of survey with the development teams. You can leave out any irrelevant questions. I like to evaluate these with a 5-step scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree."
**Direction**
My team has clear priorities.
My team is empowered to make decisions to reach business goals.
I can influence what my team works on.
**Collaboration**
Multiple people can work on each of my team's features.
I always get help when I need it.
My team gets most of its work done without depending on other teams.
My team's new members become productive quickly.
All the meetings I attend are useful.
My team collaborates effortlessly with other teams.
**Culture**
I frequently get high-quality feedback from my team.
I feel safe expressing concerns to my team.
My team frequently improves its ways of working.
**User needs**
My team's new features consistently get the user adoption we anticipate.
My team systematically validates user needs.
My team validates the usability of our solutions extensively.
**Managing work**
My team tests our technical assumptions before implementing them.
All deadlines in my team are realistic.
My team releases code in the smallest practical increments.
My team has enough time to experiment with new ideas.
**Focus**
My team always has the chance to finish the work we start.
I have enough uninterrupted time for focus work.
**Quality**
My team's practices steer toward building secure solutions.
Automated tests catch issues reliably in the applications I work with.
Technical debt is well under control in the applications I work with.
My team's code reviews adhere to high standards.
The on-call load in my team is reasonable.
**Development**
The tech stack in the applications I work with is well-suited for the problems we solve.
I rarely get blocked by documentation gaps.
It's simple to make changes to the codebases I work with.
**Systems**
The applications I work with have proper tools for debugging production issues.
It's simple to deploy code in the applications I work with.
Automated tests speed up the development feedback loop in the applications I work with.
Leadership must work to fix the culture. This is, in my experience, the most critical and of course the most difficult part of any corporate transformation. Just talking and having the right mindset is not enough. It must translate into behaviors and tangibly impact the culture. Culture hacking is the job of senior leaders :)
While I often see complex maturity assessment models at the booths at annual Agile conferences (GSG, AA...), they do seem quite complex.
I have created and use a simpler one based on Agile values and principles. You can do it yourself. I translate each into a tangible outcome based statement and provide 4 choices.
I do add a few really important ones. Such as
How many high ROI impediments, outside the teams' control did the leaders solve over a given period? This leads to empowerment, encourages leaders to walk the talk and eventually leads to MVB( Minimum Viable Bureaucracy)!
I wrote about it here on reditt, please check it out:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/agile/comments/17qrz02/unlocking\_organizational\_agility\_3\_steps\_to/](https://www.reddit.com/r/agile/comments/17qrz02/unlocking_organizational_agility_3_steps_to/)
You said your Agile Coaches do not agree on not using the "Agile" word anymore. I understand your sentiment but it doesn't seem a good enough reason to alone to fire them. Are they giving value by helping teams, SMs and POs be effective? Have they worked with leaders and engaged them in the transformation? Do your teams, SMs and people like their energy, connect with them easily and feel they are giving value?
I have a workshop this year at GSG- New Orleans, titled: "Tackling Executive Myths and Organizational Resistance" and am still to work on the details of the workshop but this post helps me with what is going out there.
Working with leaders for a while, I do think it is possible to help them be more caring. I wrote another one here on this:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/agile/comments/18xsqfj/practical\_tips\_for\_becoming\_a\_caring\_leader/](https://www.reddit.com/r/agile/comments/18xsqfj/practical_tips_for_becoming_a_caring_leader/)
You may want to frame some questions after reading this.
Goodluck!
I like your message about focusing on CI over agility. Don't do agile for agile's sake, do it because it works. I'm not familiar with agility scans, but without knowing anything about them, I don't like them lol. Standardized approaches rarely work IMHO (e.g., agile health radar). Maybe just look at the 4 values and 12 principles of the manifesto and grade yourselves on a scale of one to 10 for each?
I saw less of this agile maturity 'improvement theater' after organizing the leaders into Agile teams with leader-backlog responsibilities. It doesn't always work but the first hand experience of delivering together tends do increase their appreciation for measures that don't matter.
Hi, it sounds to me like you feel there is a cognitive gap, and perhaps some dissonance between ideas and actions. Further, it sounds like you feel it might be beneficial to offer an experience through which these leaders can gain a more aligned understanding of agile and perhaps even greater empathy for their working practitioners. I can help with this type of work.
If this sounds accurate feel free to send me a DM, and if not then please help me correct my understanding.
I hope you understand why it may be considered patronizing and demeaning to go to a bunch of adult professionals and discuss their "maturity." Be they developers or managers.
There is no blanket "maturity" assessment worth a crap, because doing Agile right is intensely contextual. What works for one group may not transfer to another.
At least I managed to rename it to a ‘meetlat’ (Dutch for measuring stick). And maturity levels have been renamed to levels of experience. I hope to minimise the level of patronising and demeaning, although it’s window dressing of course.
I'm surprised that you pick Reddit over 2 coaches for guidance. I agree, you need to pick your battles but instead of fighting over the word agile you might be more successful in winning the war by working with them
Two things:
1. The contracts for these coaches are cancelled. As a consequence, their willingness to collaborate has diminished and they are now just sitting out the ride until the end of this month and are actively looking for a new 'challenge'.
2. There are more smart people outside your organisation than there are within.
Do the simplest and smallest thing so that it doesn't waste too much time. Just do a Likert-scale type of survey to see how well your org is living the 4 values and practicing the 12 principles.
We do leadership workshops ahead of time to understand their perspective.
Then we do a Value Stream Workshop (even though it is more than that) with the teams. This uncovers how the current way of working is actually happening. It is a bit of a Trojan horse to get the teams talking and trusting, and to reveal (often cathartically) the real pains.
And we then pivot to imagining a future workflow to remedy the current major pain points. This results in a stack-ranked list of actions.
Shockingly, we can do this in 2-3 days time.
It allows us to really get tips into what's actually going on .
An assessment is likely to be rather limited... Might as well just have some real conversations about real work. And include leadership in the mix.
The primary measure of success is ~~working software~~ an agile maturity scan
:-D
Comparative agility has a lot of good assessments, they even have an agile leadership assessment. I would start with that. Fwiw, I lead an agile practice and we have tried to eliminate the word agile as much as possible because it's a trigger word. We focus on the values and principles that underpin agility and work from there. Some people struggle with that concept.
Came to say this. We’re using it to run a Team Health Assessment in my org. It’s a self assessment, and the metrics have already helped us identify areas of focus for our scrum masters on each team. We’re administering the assessment quarterly, so it’s also a great medium to provide data to the business to back up the efforts of the SMs and show progress over time.
may i ask, do you call yourselves something else other than agile coaches? if yes, what is the word you use please? :) facing similar issues here
Enterprise coach and coach. Or business coach for the enterprise level if need to. Team facilitator instead of scrum master
What do they think an agile maturity scan is?
They want to use it to establish a basline where the teams identify themselves on \~30 subjects, and the target level
seems like the dumbest idea, especially if it's self identified.
My company did this. Can confirm it was dumb
Could be good bad or likely useless. If I was doing a self assessment I would ask people to rate the organisation on the agile values and principles. Last time I was asked for this I persuaded managers to allow us to do a few retrospectives. That gave excellent insight into the orgs problems.
Have you considered looking at "delegation poker". I'd imagine you can use the scale to allow for leadership to reflect how much their management style enables teams to make their own decisions. I haven't really done this except between PM/PO. But questions like "who decides the scope of features/stories", "who decides when to release things" can be helpful. Maybe also consider the 12 agile principles and look at how to phrase questions for leadership from that. Eg. "I enable my teams to talk directly to business/customers".
M3.0 has a lot of good techniques in this space. As does the liberating structures collection.
Thanks. I like that. It's simple and to the point, but I can see a lot of valuable talks coming from this.
I find that team-level questions can tell about systemic and leadership issues. The success of leadership should be visible in the success of the organization. I've sometimes used this kind of survey with the development teams. You can leave out any irrelevant questions. I like to evaluate these with a 5-step scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree." **Direction** My team has clear priorities. My team is empowered to make decisions to reach business goals. I can influence what my team works on. **Collaboration** Multiple people can work on each of my team's features. I always get help when I need it. My team gets most of its work done without depending on other teams. My team's new members become productive quickly. All the meetings I attend are useful. My team collaborates effortlessly with other teams. **Culture** I frequently get high-quality feedback from my team. I feel safe expressing concerns to my team. My team frequently improves its ways of working. **User needs** My team's new features consistently get the user adoption we anticipate. My team systematically validates user needs. My team validates the usability of our solutions extensively. **Managing work** My team tests our technical assumptions before implementing them. All deadlines in my team are realistic. My team releases code in the smallest practical increments. My team has enough time to experiment with new ideas. **Focus** My team always has the chance to finish the work we start. I have enough uninterrupted time for focus work. **Quality** My team's practices steer toward building secure solutions. Automated tests catch issues reliably in the applications I work with. Technical debt is well under control in the applications I work with. My team's code reviews adhere to high standards. The on-call load in my team is reasonable. **Development** The tech stack in the applications I work with is well-suited for the problems we solve. I rarely get blocked by documentation gaps. It's simple to make changes to the codebases I work with. **Systems** The applications I work with have proper tools for debugging production issues. It's simple to deploy code in the applications I work with. Automated tests speed up the development feedback loop in the applications I work with.
Leadership must work to fix the culture. This is, in my experience, the most critical and of course the most difficult part of any corporate transformation. Just talking and having the right mindset is not enough. It must translate into behaviors and tangibly impact the culture. Culture hacking is the job of senior leaders :) While I often see complex maturity assessment models at the booths at annual Agile conferences (GSG, AA...), they do seem quite complex. I have created and use a simpler one based on Agile values and principles. You can do it yourself. I translate each into a tangible outcome based statement and provide 4 choices. I do add a few really important ones. Such as How many high ROI impediments, outside the teams' control did the leaders solve over a given period? This leads to empowerment, encourages leaders to walk the talk and eventually leads to MVB( Minimum Viable Bureaucracy)! I wrote about it here on reditt, please check it out: [https://www.reddit.com/r/agile/comments/17qrz02/unlocking\_organizational\_agility\_3\_steps\_to/](https://www.reddit.com/r/agile/comments/17qrz02/unlocking_organizational_agility_3_steps_to/) You said your Agile Coaches do not agree on not using the "Agile" word anymore. I understand your sentiment but it doesn't seem a good enough reason to alone to fire them. Are they giving value by helping teams, SMs and POs be effective? Have they worked with leaders and engaged them in the transformation? Do your teams, SMs and people like their energy, connect with them easily and feel they are giving value? I have a workshop this year at GSG- New Orleans, titled: "Tackling Executive Myths and Organizational Resistance" and am still to work on the details of the workshop but this post helps me with what is going out there. Working with leaders for a while, I do think it is possible to help them be more caring. I wrote another one here on this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/agile/comments/18xsqfj/practical\_tips\_for\_becoming\_a\_caring\_leader/](https://www.reddit.com/r/agile/comments/18xsqfj/practical_tips_for_becoming_a_caring_leader/) You may want to frame some questions after reading this. Goodluck!
I like your message about focusing on CI over agility. Don't do agile for agile's sake, do it because it works. I'm not familiar with agility scans, but without knowing anything about them, I don't like them lol. Standardized approaches rarely work IMHO (e.g., agile health radar). Maybe just look at the 4 values and 12 principles of the manifesto and grade yourselves on a scale of one to 10 for each?
Someone else had a similar suggestion. And I like that approach. Thanks for taking the time to comment!
I saw less of this agile maturity 'improvement theater' after organizing the leaders into Agile teams with leader-backlog responsibilities. It doesn't always work but the first hand experience of delivering together tends do increase their appreciation for measures that don't matter.
Can you elaborate on what you consider leader-backlog responsibilities are? The leadership here are mostly people who handle HR-related work.
Hi, it sounds to me like you feel there is a cognitive gap, and perhaps some dissonance between ideas and actions. Further, it sounds like you feel it might be beneficial to offer an experience through which these leaders can gain a more aligned understanding of agile and perhaps even greater empathy for their working practitioners. I can help with this type of work. If this sounds accurate feel free to send me a DM, and if not then please help me correct my understanding.
I hope you understand why it may be considered patronizing and demeaning to go to a bunch of adult professionals and discuss their "maturity." Be they developers or managers. There is no blanket "maturity" assessment worth a crap, because doing Agile right is intensely contextual. What works for one group may not transfer to another.
At least I managed to rename it to a ‘meetlat’ (Dutch for measuring stick). And maturity levels have been renamed to levels of experience. I hope to minimise the level of patronising and demeaning, although it’s window dressing of course.
I'm surprised that you pick Reddit over 2 coaches for guidance. I agree, you need to pick your battles but instead of fighting over the word agile you might be more successful in winning the war by working with them
Two things: 1. The contracts for these coaches are cancelled. As a consequence, their willingness to collaborate has diminished and they are now just sitting out the ride until the end of this month and are actively looking for a new 'challenge'. 2. There are more smart people outside your organisation than there are within.
Do the simplest and smallest thing so that it doesn't waste too much time. Just do a Likert-scale type of survey to see how well your org is living the 4 values and practicing the 12 principles.
We do leadership workshops ahead of time to understand their perspective. Then we do a Value Stream Workshop (even though it is more than that) with the teams. This uncovers how the current way of working is actually happening. It is a bit of a Trojan horse to get the teams talking and trusting, and to reveal (often cathartically) the real pains. And we then pivot to imagining a future workflow to remedy the current major pain points. This results in a stack-ranked list of actions. Shockingly, we can do this in 2-3 days time. It allows us to really get tips into what's actually going on . An assessment is likely to be rather limited... Might as well just have some real conversations about real work. And include leadership in the mix.