ASMM: Agile Scaling Maturity Model

During a presentation of our approach to scaling agile I constructed „Stefans Agile Scaling Maturity Model“ (SASMM, not trademarked) in an ad-hoc fashion: The number of scaling practices you don’t need. It was a joke but I think there might be something behind the curtain.

Let’s start with the Agile Scaling Cycle: We start with reducing dependencies between teams and with the outside context. Then we do some work and need to coordinate the remaining dependencies. During this work we generate insights and detect organizational impediments. These direct us during the further development of the company. The evolved structures and processes of the company give us additional options for reducing dependencies and we start a new loop through the Agile Scaling Cycle. The whole cycle is driven by the agile scaling principles (which are just the agile/lean principles reformulated for scaling; see http://scaledprinciples.org).

The trick here is to reduce dependencies to the point where coordination becomes dead simple. When we went through the Agile Scaling Cycle several times the company should be more mature, teams should be less dependent and in consequence we need very few coordination practices. Therefore the first formula to compute the scaling maturity on a scale from 0 to 10 (the higher the score more mature) could be:

ScalingMaturityLevel = 10/NumberOfCoordinationPractices

Of course some coordination practices are more agile than others. A dependency matrix is less agile than a shared Sprint Review. So we could weight the practices by the additional weight they put on the process. But that would be another blogpost and in the end I’m not convinced that maturity models are valuable.