Introduction

Agile management techniques are becoming increasingly popular among companies today. Agile methodologies focus on delivering value early and often, rather than waiting until the last minute. They encourage teams to collaborate closely and iteratively build software solutions.

Agile management allows organizations to continuously improve their processes and operations.

An agile organization has achieved an appropriate level of maturity in its ability to deliver software solutions that meet business needs. This includes having a mature product portfolio, a strong governance framework, and a culture that supports continuous improvement. To reach this level as part of an agile transformation strategy is a long journey which needs to be monitored and continuously checked and adjusted.

But how do you measure the level of maturity? How do you identify measures which brings your teams forward?

If you answered “not agile at all” or “needs improvement”, then you might want to read on and understand the basics of an agile maturity assessment and how a tool such crewlevel can support you .

What is crewlevel?

crewlevel is a cloud-based software solution that enables organizations to easily measure their agile maturity. It supports agile teams in planning, executing, monitoring, improving, and measuring their own agile journey.

The core idea behind crewlevel is to provide a simple yet powerful platform for collecting and analyzing data. The platform consists of four main components:

• Periodic Collection of data from agile assessments and collaboration tools (such as JIRA)
• Calculation of KPIs and visualization of results in ready-to-use dashboards and widgets
• Tasks recommendations and executions based on previously executed successfully tasks
• Gamification for sustainable and supporting teams (++ planned ++)

What is agile maturity?

Agile maturity refers to an organization’s ability to perform agile development effectively. This includes the capability to plan for, execute, monitor, and improve upon agile processes and practices.

The goal of agile maturity is to achieve a high degree of agility within an organization. It helps to ensure that the organization is able to respond quickly to changing market conditions and customer requirements.

Measuring agile maturity

There are several different ways to assess agile maturity. The most popular approach is to use a maturity model. An agile maturity model provides a structured way to evaluate an organization’s current state and progress towards achieving higher levels of agility.

Typically, there are three main components to any agile benchmarking framework:

• A set of key performance indicators (KPIs);
• An agile maturity index (AMI); and
• A methodology for gathering data.

An agile maturity index is usually based on a scoring system composed of various questions and weightage for each question.

A typical agile maturity assessment will include a series of questions about the following areas besides of team performance:

• Product portfolio;
• Agile techniques and tools;
• Governance;
• Culture and mindset;
• Governance;
• Training and education;
• Customer feedback

Data gathering process

There are several ways to assess agile maturity at regular intervals in a well-defined assessment process:

1. Self-assessment by the team itself
2. External assessments by third parties
3. A combination of both

Self-assessment

This type of assessment is typically used when the organization wants to determine if it has reached a certain level of maturity.

It involves collecting information from the team members themselves. This could be done through interviews, surveys, or through a collective team session or workshop.

External Assessment

When using this mode of assessment, the organization sends out a survey to its customers, partners, suppliers, or anyone else who might have insight into how the organization performs.

In some cases, the organization may want to compare its own score against others. In these scenarios, it would send out the same survey to multiple organizations.

Combination of Both

Some organizations may choose to do a combination of both types of assessments.

As a result, they can get a more complete picture of their overall agility.

crewlevel supports as generic platform all above mentioned periodic assessments modes. Based on the results of the survey crewlevel calculates the final score and compares it with a target score which can be adjusted for each team

An agile score can be typically taken to compare teams with each other as well as against industry benchmarks.

But is just a score enough to really estimate the agile maturity level of a team?

No!

It is important to note that agile scores are not always accurate reflections of a team’s true capabilities. There are many factors that influence the outcome of an agile maturity assessment. These include but are not limited to:

• Team size;
• Experience;
• all skills required to act as a cross-functional team;
• Number of projects managed;
• Project complexity;
• Industry sector;
• Business domain;

Hence, just one score is not sufficient to make meaningful comparisons between teams. In fact, it may even lead to misleading conclusions.

In order to get more insight into the actual strengths and weaknesses of a team, we recommend using a tool like crewlevel.

Comprehensive state of a team with crewlevel

crewlevel not only lets agile coaches or companies create their own assessments for teams and crews which are tailored to the specific requirements of the organization. You can also use it for other types of assessment, such as obtaining feedback from other stakeholders and showing them in a unified dashboard.

For example, you could create an assessment for your product owner to see how he/she performs in relation to his/her role (part of management perspective). Or you could have a separate assessment for your customer to request a periodic rating of every release whether its outcome created a positive, neutral or negative business value.

You'd create a 360° review, which involves reviewing your team's performance from different angles by different stakeholders, including their morale, their productivity, and their product/service delivery as well as their Quality Assurance aspects.

Regular data gathering can be simplified and automated by crewlevel.

crewlevel allows you to easily collect data from surveys with internal and external participants for each assessment as well as display its results in dashboards for quick insights (e.g. top 10 similarities of responses, etc.).

In addition, crewlevel supports you to set adjustable target levels for each team and assessment to help them improve over time. This way you can measure progress towards goals and keep track of where your teams stand (current level) compared to target levels.

As a result, you can gain insights into what works best for your team and what doesn't work at all. This will help you to improve your processes and practices.

Moreover, crewlevel provides a comprehensive overview of your team's current state and helps you to identify areas where improvements can be made.

By importing further information from applications like JIRA or other collaboration tools you can create further typical KPIs (like velocity, time, Changed-to-done rate, etc.) on-the-fly to provide additional insights as basis for identification of performance or other gaps.

Ready-To-use comprehensive dashboards

Hereby, crewlevel offers a variety of widgets for your team dashboard to present the results of your assessments and selected KPIs in a clear and concise manner. You can use these widgets out-of-the box without extra knowledge to share the results with your colleagues, managers, customers and partners.

The following figure shows a sample dashboard for a project management team:

Integrated improvement tasks

With the comprehensive representation of results, you can easily identify which topics are the most important ones and take actions accordingly on those assessment findings, such as:

• How to improve communication and collaboration within the team;
• What skills should be developed;
• how to resolve conflicts within a team;
• other improvement tasks to increase performance, quality or entire way of working

Those actions or improvement tasks are the outputs of a team session, which must be regularly monitored and checked by the team members. A simplified integrated task management system allows the team to see which tasks are open and closed.

Improvement tasks can also be collected as part of a shared team assessment and associated with the corresponding section of an assessment.

A team may also agree on a adjustable improvement plan or roadmap to measure the impact of each of the tasks properly.

If tasks are completed successfully, they can be rated by the team whether the outcome of the results lead to an improvement. If shared with other teams, those tasks can be offered as suggestion for another teams.

Summary

crewlevel has a lot more to offer. It is not only a tool that helps you to assess your team but also a complete solution to support you in improving your processes and practices across entire value streams (in scaled organizations).

Data can be consolidated and reported on next flight levels beyond team level, providing you with a holistic view of your entire organization’s progress.

crewlevel is easy to use and doesn't require much effort to get started.

You can easily integrate crewlevel with any collaboration tool such as JIRA to collect data for ready-to use widgets in your team dashboards.

In addition, you can export results and data to Excel, CSV.

Do you want to get more information about crewlevel?