Article

Assessing Your Organization’s Agile Maturity

Authors: Lukas Haupt, Stefan Volk

A couple of years ago, larger organizations focused solely on implementing agile projects in which they tried to leverage benefits from agile methodologies to deliver better results, with higher quality and a faster time-to-market. These days, the discussion has moved on: More and more organizations are thinking about transforming the entire enterprise into a product-centric organization to bring business and IT closer together and deliver more value directly to the customer.

Several organizations have already started on their journey or are planning to do so. Before deciding to embark on such an endeavor, it is important to evaluate whether agile is the right solution to achieve the organization’s goals. Otherwise, the risk of being stuck in a long-term transformation without direct benefits is likely to be high. Having agreed on the urgency of an agile transformation, we usually find ourselves discussing with our clients all the diverse dimensions that need to be considered for such a journey.

Are you pondering the same questions as most of our clients?

Deloitte’s Organizational Agile Maturity Assessment (OAMA)

To help you answer these questions, we have developed our Organizational Agile Maturity Assessment (OAMA), which assists organizations in starting and monitoring the transformation toward an agile organization. It assesses the initial agile readiness and maturity of your company, identifies the dimensions and factors that need to be considered during the transformation, tracks the progress of the transformation and readjusts to new emerging objectives.

This includes an assessment of an organization’s ability to adopt an agile way of working as well as agile methodologies. If your organization aims to become truly agile, you need to look at the organization holistically. Simply implementing an agile methodology for a single project or product is not going far enough, since organizational factors may still impede the work of agile teams. That is why the assessment considers all surrounding organizational parameters affecting the work within a project or product team.

 

The Agile Capability Framework and How to Apply It

The heart of the OAMA is the Agile Capability Framework, which is comprised of the four key dimensions of Strategy & Governance, People & Culture, Procedures and Technology & Tools. Each dimension has been broken down into more detailed areas (called “Factors”) to get a comprehensive view on the topics you need to consider when looking at your organizational agile maturity. The framework has been developed based on our project experience in recent years and has been enriched with research in external and internal sources.

The Dimensions and Factors are measured by interviewing key stakeholders from top management to line functions across your organization, using a comprehensive questionnaire. To enable you to ask specific and relevant questions to each stakeholder, the Factors are broken down into more than 100 “inspected objects.” Each inspected object and therefore each Factor is rated based on a four-level scale from “Agile Impeded” to “In Transition” and “Doing Agile” to “Being Agile.” As the next maturity level for each Factor is already defined in the framework, it can also serve as a guide to your transformation. You can also use the rating as a reference point for the management team, as a conversation starter for a transformation or even as a concrete basis for deriving a high-level transformation roadmap and concrete first areas and steps to be tackled.

Furthermore, the OAMA serves as a guide on the continuous improvement journey toward agility and helps to ensure that you are investing in the right things and that the different changes will all fit together.

If you are currently asking similar questions about an organizational agile transformation or simply want to learn more about Deloitte’s OAMA, please feel free to contact us.