Agile transformation is something much discussed nowadays by companies that want to be aligned with the market and develop better products and services. However, being able to identify what level of agile maturity your company is at is an important part of the process, and often quite complex. Understanding how agile your company is already is a journey, sometimes quite a long one, that people need to go through to know what needs to be transformed within a team, an area or even the entire organization.

Read this article and understand all about the real agile transformation.

Knowing your maturity levels will help you get to a high stage faster and more effectively. That’s why, in this article, we’ll explain what characterizes each stage of agility  so that you can identify where your company is in this transformation process.

 

The stages of maturity and agile transformation

Being agile is developing capabilities that offer agility to your business. Technologies, culture and work processes create an environment where it is possible to carry out small deliveries of a product in a short cycle, in order to prove a hypothesis that will generate efficient operations and greater capacity to generate current revenues.</ span>

There are many benefits to being an agile company, and to take advantage of them, you need a systemic view of your business.

Traditional companies, for the most part, have long processes, a lot of command and control, lack of engagement and ownership among employees, areas that don’t talk to each other,  among other features. An agile company, on the other hand, focuses on short processes, with shorter delivery times and improvements in alignment between teams. Unfortunately, most companies in the market are halfway there, they want to be agile but have a traditional mindset that holds them back in the transformation process.

According to 14th State Of Agile, 95% of the companies that participated in this research use some kind of agile method in their daily lives. However, 82% of these organizations have not incorporated these concepts across the enterprise and still need to increase this level of maturity in order to expand these concepts beyond small teams and enterprise-wide initiatives.

With streamlined processes and a new mindset, agile companies have an easier means of identifying faults. Remembering that when we talk about agile transformation, we have 4 pillars:

1. communication — individuals and interactions more than processes and tools;
2. pragmatism — product working more than comprehensive documentation;
3. collaboration — collaboration with the client more than contract negotiation;
4. adaptability — responding to change rather than following a plan.

 

Knowing the Agile Maturity Stages

Stage 0 – Traditional Companies

These are those companies where the employee or manager has heard about agile transformation but hasn’t put it into practice yet.

Usually, these are companies that, a person who has read a book or article on agile methodology, understands the importance of this process as a whole and will start looking for a consultancy to in order to have professional help in the transformation.

She even tries to implement some concepts and practices, but because she doesn’t have all of this incorporated as a whole, she ends up failing or even giving little result.

 

Stage 1 – Agile Mechanical

This is the stage where most companies are!

At this point, you already know the conceffect of agile transformation, but not the complete process.

Normally, the company already uses methods such as Kanban, has daily alignments, changes area names to squads, uses post-its to organize tasks and some other organizational methods.. . Despite this, it still cannot be considered, in fact, an agile company.

 

• It is not yet a transparent organization with clear objectives</li >

• There is no transparency of information, with a lot of visual management</li >

• It still does not have short cycle deliveries, with a focus on value generation</i >

• There is a need for more visibility, improvement in processes and more collaborative areas</ read>

 

 This is Mechanical Agile! A stage in which one already knows and uses some agile concepts and practices, but the culture, the mindset is still completely traditional and Taylorist. Is it possible to change the behavior of this company and reach another level of agile maturity? Yes, with training, consulting and building high performance teams – which is what we do with the help of Agile School – our educational area and at Agile Inc, developing enterprise solutions.

 

Stage 2 – Trying the agile

These companies are at an intermediate level, halfway through. Despite being past the mechanical agile stage, it still lacks the continuous workflow to be at the advanced level.

Processes still need to be improved and employees still need to develop skills, knowledge and experience.

This is a process stage where companies are starting the agile journey. It is a passing stage, where companies stay for a short time, as they are in the race for agile and digital transformation.

 

Stage 3 – Professional Agile

The company is already reaping the fruits of agile transformation and has already completed the entire transformation process. The areas connect by working together, mainly supporting the business areas, and really put the customer at the center of decision making.

They have more transparency and give visibility to what’s happening for everyone. And they prioritize deliveries and always ask themselves “are we doing the right thing?”

Companies that are running an Agile Professional have the Agile mindset on a daily basis within teams and decentralize decisions, but with high alignment. Not only the leadership, but the teams already understand the importance of having clear and well-defined goals, as well as alignment in the execution of processes.

The teams are empowered, each one has a certain freedom of decision, not being all centralized in a single manager. Furthermore, innovations happen all the time, as there is complete freedom to adapt in all areas of the company.

 

Employees work motivated and therefore produce more solutions.

 

In agile leadership, goals are determined, the company knows its customer in depth, promoting the delivery of value and removing impediments.

 

The 4Ps of Agility

Here at Agile.Inc we classify companies into 4 stages, we will better understand each of them so that you can identify which stage your company is at and thus make improvements until reaching professional agile, that is, at the top of agility.

Process: teams with goals, visual management, agile product delivery, flow management

People: roles and responsibilities, clear goals, self-organization, multidisciplinarity, values ​​and principles

Product: product backlog, management, metrics, UX, UI

Engineering Practices: quality, devops, clean code, Agile QA, automation

The 4P’s at the Mechanical level:

• development team falling out

• product owner proxy: just take orders without caring too much</ read>

• is a team that doesn’t think about valuing the product</ read>

• does not have an integrated view

• no portfolio

• many things are done based on guesswork and not on having studied metrics

• scrum master or agile: is one who is in his first experience of agility. It still doesn’t have much expertise, bringing something more theoretical.

• it is not clear where your responsibilities begin and end</li >

• predictive leadership, which monitors your collaborators.

• the team serves the leader

• long flow, each area has its task and priorities</ read>

• documentation is unclear

• tests are done manually

• staff is seen as coders

 

The 4P’s at the Professional Agile level

• the team understands each other and works together

• has a fully integrated view of processes

• have an overview of what’s going on

• processes collaborate with the delivery of product value</li >

• people expose problems

• employees bring new insights

• errors are accepted and are part of learning

• it is necessary to use self-organization, using the wisdom and intelligence of the whole team.

• the team is engaged, motivated and with purpose

• leadership changes its profile, being a culture of delivering value, avoiding waste.< /i>

• leader serves the team

• teams work together with the same goal, making jobs finish quickly</span >

• team is a co-author, they know the best solution to a given problem</i >

 

Creating an agile product is complex, so there’s no way things can be done separately (as is done in the traditional way). For everything to work correctly, operations, professionals need to be integrated so that everything is done quickly and with value delivery, so the company is able to identify a problem still in production, without this problem reaching the user< /span>

 

How it all happens…

Imagine the following.

A company manager analyzes the market and realizes that he needs to be more agile. With this idea in mind, an agile method is implemented in the company, but only that.
The organization’s culture is not modified, it has no foundation principles, that is, this minimal change is made mechanically.

This makes the team’s productivity drop, as the manager doesn’t have enough expertise to know about the status quo change, he just wanted to be more agile, but he didn’t made a strategic study about this.

This is where the famous J-Curve enters, which we’ll explain below.

 

J-Curve – The Curve of Change

The J-Curve was developed by psychotherapist Virginia Satir. In psychotherapy, the change model is described in 5 stages, which have an effect on feelings, thoughts, performance and philosophy. By going through these effects you would be able to improve how you process change and how you help other people process it.

When we talk about organizational agility, you can also use the J-turn as a road to be traversed. In many ways, a level of agility helps to reduce risk. But when we’re talking about organizational change, this agility, most of the time, will first express itself in a slight decline in performance.

It’s important to say that this is totally normal, and is directly linked to changes in the organization’s status quo, which shortly after the decline will start to elevate its performance.

In general, this process happens when a person in the organization reads something about agility and realizes that they need transformation (even if they don’t really know what it means to be agile). Due to this shallow perception of ‘being agile’, the method is implemented in this organization in a mechanical way, causing the team’s productivity to drop. This is exactly what the J Curve says.

 

Identifying the stage of maturity of my company.

There are some perspectives that can be analyzed and taken into consideration to see how agile your company is considered.

 

Practices and Roles

The aim is to understand if the organization is using processes efficiently and also if everyone knows their respective roles within the company.

If you don’t know how to identify this, there are a few questions you should ask:

• Is it clear what the responsibilities of the roles currently available in the company are?
• Is the teams workflow visible?
• Do teams have explicit policies (eg definition of ready to work, definition of done etc.)?</ span>
• Are bottlenecks and queues visible in the teams workflow?
• Do the teams have clarity on the main sources of rework?
• Are software engineering practices being used to keep code healthy?
• Is the publishing process automated?
• Are there automated tests?

 

Metrics

The intent is to understand if your company has been using business and process metrics. And if so, at what level?

We need to stress the importance of developing benchmark metrics that will help improve your business. To analyze this, ask yourself:

• Are business metrics being used in the decision-making process?
• Are they visible for everyone in the company to review?
• They are used as a reference in the process of defining an initiative (ex: which business indicators will be leveraged by project X) ?
• Do teams use process metrics to project lead times?
• E for ansmooth the health of the process?

 

Business-oriented prioritization

Does your organization set priorities? Or is everything seen as a priority? When that happens, nothing is really a priority, after all, everything is on the same level.

You need to understand if there is a structured prioritization process. Ask yourself:

• Are there clear prioritization criteria?
• Has prioritization taken into account customer needs?
• Are business metrics used in the prioritization process of initiatives?
• Is an analysis of dependencies between initiatives carried out before finalizing the prioritization process?</li >

 

Financial result

Does your company measure the financial results of its initiatives? This is very important in the agile process and to find out if you are already doing this or not, ask yourself:

• Is the organization’s leadership clear about the business objectives of each initiative?
• Are the teams measuring the financial result of deliveries?
• The organization is able to classify the initiatives according to the expected result (ex: this initiative will generate greater efficiency in the business, will help to conquer market share, will it be an innovation, will it anticipate the cost of delay?)

These 4 analyzes will help you diagnose what stage of agility your business is at and where you need to improve.

 

Ok, I know my stage, how can I improve?

Now that you’ve identified what stage your company is at, we at Agile Inc. have some solutions that can be done to help your company move further along the J Curve. quickly and reach the desired status quo.

In this case, some things will be analyzed, like:

• what is the company’s maturity problem?
• what is the executive’s mindset
• how is your team, is it lined up?
• how have agile methods been implemented so far?

 

After analyzing this pitch and the manager understands that they have a problem to be solved. We will help you accelerate the J Curve and thus move your company forward on the transformation path. These solutions consist of training, consulting and building squads.

First, we will make a radar of your organization, which consists in understanding where the flaws are, where you need to improve, so that we can build a right strategy optimized for your company.< /span>

 

Squad
It is important to have a team of people with adequate skills for some processes, the SQUADs. As each client is unique, it is necessary to analyze the working conditions in order to set up an adapted multidisciplinary team.

 

Consultancy

It uses agile methodologies to transform the way you create products, help you connect with your customers and generate competitive advantage.

With the help of a consultancy, it is possible to break the traditional mindset so that an agile transformation can take place.

 

Trains

Training to adapt and improve the team according to the needs of your company and your employees. All certified by Scrum.org and made by Agile School.

 

Now that you know your agility stage, contact our consultants and truly transform your company.