Monetical Thinking - December 19
Measuring Agile capability and maturity
Delivering Agile is hard work. Many organisations and teams that embark on a journey to transform themselves from traditional waterfall to an Agile process of value delivery, find that Agile principles are easily described but hard to embed.
With over 10 years of Agile transformation experience, Monetical has established that successful Agile implementations monitor their progress against a set of industry best practices. The Monetical Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) now includes 7 capability and maturity assessments bundled into a tool called Monetical.Agile.
CAPABILITY AND MATURITY SCOPE
The ability to call upon over 10 years of Agile transformation experience and that of industry thought leaders, subject matter experts and an ever-growing community of Monetical subscribers empowers organisations to constantly drive for an ever greater level of Agile capability and maturity, whether with or without the support of external experts (contractors or consultants).
Monetical has identified (listed below) seven core functions and areas within an organisation that require constant attention and unfettered access to an ever-growing library of performance improvement measures to design the most enhanced Agile capability and maturity application available today. How Monetical.Agile meets these challenges is now explained.
Monetical has placed its agile capability and maturity assessments at the core of the Monetical Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) platform, because of its critical role as an enabler of continuous improvement. This core module is called Monetical.Agile and it is designed for Agile organisations, Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Change Agents (contractors and consultants).
Monetical.Agile includes a series of 7 capability and maturing assessments. These assessments are performed at recommended phases on the transformation timeline, or during Evaluate-Design-Adapt phases of an existing Agile implementation (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Monetical.Agile Capability and Maturity Assessment Timeline
To ensure the organisation is constantly improving its Agile capability and maturity, it must be constantly measuring itself. Assessment takes place right throughout the transformation phase into the operational phase as indicated by the upward trending dotted line in the Figure above, to respond to an ever-changing environment influenced by internal organisational and external marketplace factors. Monetical embeds upward spirals of knowledge creation and Agile feedback loops into daily working practices and thereby supports your organisation improve its Agile capability continuously through the Optimise phase. Here is a more detailed look at each assessment.
AGILE CAPABILITY AND MATURITY ASSESSMENTS
1. Transformational Success Factors
Agile Transformation success is built on a robust business case that creates revolutionary change (not evolution) to ten key areas of the organisation. Current capabilities must have been captured (as-is state) and the future capability defined (to-be state), enabling those responsible for the transformation, stakeholders and senior sponsors to support a clear and concise strategy for success.
Monetical.Agile provides the ability to assess the organisation’s business case against industry best practices. This helps refine the scope and objectives of the Agile transformation so that the true benefits of adopting Agile ways of working and cultivating an Agile mindset are realised in the most optimum way. Monetical has identified 10 success factors with a detailed explanation published at the following link: www.monetical.com/success-factors
2. Organisational Agility
For over a decade, members of the Monetical team have been involved in the design, adoption and optimisation of Agile organisations and Scrum Teams across a number of industries. During this time Monetical has identified 10 key organisational capabilities that have a significant influence on the success of an Agile transformation program. To encourage best practice and shared learning, these success factors are listed with a detailed explanation at the following link: www.monetical.com/transformation-goals
3. Team Awareness & Readiness
Undertaken towards the end of the initial Sprint (Sprint 0), this assessment helps identify any outstanding training needs, which will form part of an individual learning and development plan, or team-coaching plan.
4. Agile 12 Principles Adoption
Regular assessment of the team's capability against the 12 Agile Principles provides an accurate insight into the Agile maturity of both the team and the organisation.
5. Team Health Check
Assesses individual and team values, team spirit and whether they feel as though their work is being recognised as they work towards a common goal with the necessary empowerment.
6. Agile Ways of Working
This assessment focuses on the softer aspects of Agile adoption, including, ability to learn fast, self-organising, risk taking and the management environment.
7. Agile Capability
This comprehensive assessment measures 50 individual characteristics across 10 principle topics, including innovation, communication, people, knowledge, operations and facilities, to reveal whether best practices Agile ways of working have been embedded.
The monitoring enabled through these 7 assessments ensures Agile organisations and teams focus attention to create upward spirals of Agile capability improvement.
Each assessment is presented in the same way, using a digital board (see Figure 2). The board presents the assessment questions in a clear and consistent manner, which the team can choose to respond to individually, via an email invitation, or in a group collaborative session.
Figure 2: Screenshot Of Monetical.Agile Capability And Maturity Assessment Board
Within Monetical.Agile a neat dashboard provides a cumulative view of 10 core agile organisational capabilities that cover the array of capability and maturity assessments (see Figure 3). The neat visualisation enables key business and change owners to quickly appreciate where further effort or investment is needed, where Agile Ways of Working has been established and where continuous learning is already embedded.
Each of the 10 rings in the dashboard represent a specific capability of the organisation following the introduction of Agile ways of working and the adoption of an Agile mindset. Each ring is drawn as a series of 3 concentric circles. The inner circle represents the first time the assessment was taken, e.g. Sep 2018. The centre circle, e.g. Oct 2018 and the outer circle, e.g. Dec 2018. The dashboard visualises progress in the adoption of Agile. The more complete the coloring of the circle, the more successful the adoption of Agile in an organisation or team.
Figure 3: Screenshot of Monetical.Agile Capability and Maturity Dashboard
CAPABILITY AND MATURITY WORKFLOW
Click here to learn more about the end-to-end digital and intelligent agile capability and maturity workflow that incorporates a direct link to the world’s largest repository of agile expertise in the form of Open Stories that put the organisation on a path of continuous improvement.
ABOUT MONETICAL
Monetical leverages decades of Agile consulting experience to create the world’s first and largest source of structured Agile knowledge provided on one of the world’s most trusted cloud computing services. Placing the Monetical Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) in the hands of your Agile transformation team empowers them with knowledge from major Agile transformations that have already happened at the National Health Service, recognised FTSE and international organisations.
An Agile transformation KaaS enables your organisation to learn from best practices, internalise its’ knowledge and progress upwards in a spiral of knowledge creation that drives continuous improvement.
Organisations that use Monetical through their Agile Transformation and beyond...
...benchmark themselves to the best, because they receive a step by step guide of best practices at each phase of the transformation.
...gain control of the transformation process through a neat dashboard of ten key Agile organisational capabilities. Transparency across the organisation is improved.
...commit themselves to continuous improvement through timely assessments of Agile capability and maturity.
...increase their Agile knowledge pool with access to a library of context-relevant recommended performance improvement measures. These are drawn from real-life examples and Subject Matter Experts.
Today, Monetical delivers Agile expertise to organisations and individual professionals that form part of a global knowledge management market that experts predict will grow to USD 1,232,000 million by 2025 (Zion Market Research, 2018).
FURTHER INFORMATION
For complete and free of charge 30 day access to the Monetical KaaS, visit www.monetical.com/pricing and sign-up for an account.