Can agile mature into something greater? Or does it merely go sour with age?

Most teams begin their agile journey with Scrum. This is a great starting point if your work is plannable. Scrum gives teams a lightweight starting kit that includes most of what they need. Want to coordinate your daily work? Scrum has the daily standup. Need to get your stakeholders’ feedback to ensure you are going in the right direction? Scrum comes built-in with a demonstration of the work you completed at the end of each sprint.

But Scrum was always meant to just be the starting point for teams. To put it in the words of the Scrum Guide: “Scrum is simple. Try it as is and determine if its philosophy, theory, and structure help to achieve goals and create value. The Scrum framework is purposefully incomplete, only defining the parts required to implement Scrum theory.” When your team outgrows Scrum, how do you start bending the rules to better fit your context??

This is where the idea of a maturity model for your agile practices becomes useful. A maturity model is an idealized growth journey for agile teams.?

Here are four guidelines you can use when creating your first maturity model or updating your current one.??

One. Align the model with your organizational goals and strategies. As the teams mature and grow, they are equipped to bring even more value and help the organization pursue its goals and strategies.?

Two. Create a model with 2-3 tiers. Tier 1 contains basic agile practices with tier 2 and 3 becoming increasingly more advanced. A multi-tiered model has several advantages. It gives teams concrete points to grow towards. It gives the leadership an idea of what investments they must make in order for the teams to grow.?

Three. In addition to creating a multi-tiered model, I suggest you also make it multi-dimensional. Let me explain the difference. The tiers describe the increasing level of advancement and sophistication in how you practice agile. Within each tier, there are multiple dimensions that describe its nuances. For example, one dimension could be “Scrum events” and another could be “how the team continuously improves”. Having each tier sliced into several dimensions means that teams can pick one dimension at a time to improve, thus avoiding taking on too much change at once. For leadership, it becomes easier to identify patterns of strengths and weaknesses across teams and make system-wide changes that can help improve the weaker patterns.?

Four. Use your maturity model and incorporate it into your team’s cadence of work. Bring it up at every retrospective and use it as guidance to the improvements you are discussing. Set aside 60-90 minutes every three months for a re-assessment of how you are doing. Where have you moved the needle? Did you move up a level? And where can you continue to improve??

Reach out to me at [email protected] if you could use a starting point for your team’s agile maturity model. I am always happy to help.?

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Klaus Boedker is a certified agile coach with over 12 years of experience delivering agile coaching and training at diverse organizations covering for-profit, not-for-profit, and the public sector. His background includes co-developing agile training classes and certifications recognized worldwide, and leading teams of scrum masters, software developers, and project managers helping them grow their careers. Reach out to connect at [email protected].