One size doesn’t fit it all - Build your own Maturity Model for Business Agility
Almost all companies are currently enforcing there businesses becomming more agile. Here is the problem, there’s rather no definition what business agility means, nor an instrument out there where you could see the progress of your journey.-The only thing we know is one size doesn’t fit it all!-So what’s the alternative, what if you could build our own Maturity Model for Business Agility and use it as a collaboration tool too?
"Business Agility is something very individual and different for every business and so for every organization. Organizations where there business is agile are able to react on surprises faster, recognize the real customer needs earlier, continuously learn and improve and appreciate the customer, employees and partners similarly." -- Mirko Kleiner, co-founder flowdays
Currently there is a big discussion about the definition of business agility in the agile community ongoing. I don’t claim mine is complete nor perfect but lets assume this would be a definition we all agree on.
Agile here, agile there, agile everywhere!
Real business agility needs a transformation throught-out all the organization. The 5 bubbles symbolize multiple perspectives of agile from an organization point of view:
Source: flowdays, adapted by Mirko Kleiner
"Scaling agility acts as a multiplier for business agility." -- Philipp Engstler, co-founder flowdays
Personal agility: "Being Agile", the mindset shift towards the agile values and principles is a change that starts with every individual and needs our attention every day e.g. how we behave, lead, etc
Team Agility: By being agile personally we could lead by example and influence the behavior of our team members. The team is the most powerful element in an agile organization and the place where customer value is created.
Company Agility: agile teams lead to more agile teams and other aspects will be adopted over time like e.g. innovation, less hierarchies, management, portfolio management, budgeting, HR, etc
Partner Ecosystem Agility: The full potential of business agility could be only reached if not just our organisation is agile but the whole value chain with all our partners and their partners.
We belive every of these perspectives of agility brings it's value and acts as a multiplier towards business agility.
But is it worth to creat a maturity model for that and how would it look like?
Maturity Model, does one size fits it all?
A maturity model has usually predefined levels and criterias to reach each of the levels. It’s usually defined by an external authority or a community of practice. I often see, that the only aim of a maturity model is to make money with assessments, certifications, etc. I belive that a maturity model should be owned by the organization and used as a tool for there further development and improvement instead. If we accept that business agility is something very individual we also need to rethink the idea of an one-size fits it all maturity model for business agility.
As a result the "Business Agility Maturity Model" we created is more kind of a pattern like e.g. the „User Story“ pattern. We took the main aspects of a maturity model and made them abstract, so that every organization could use and customze it according there needs and context. Depending on your needs keep it lean or go into more details if needed.
the business agility maturity model by Mirko Kleiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Business agility maturitymodel version 1.0
Context: In what business we need how much business agility and how fast, etc. What are our boundaries by the organization
Vision: What’s the vision, that reflects the purpose of our journey, i.o.w. the WHY we wanna become a more agile business
Dimensions: In what dimensions we wanna get better (see some examples below)
Levels: What levels, or steps of development we know in our context
Acceptance Criterias: What are the acceptance criterias so that we know we made a developement
Status: What is our current status in this journey
Goal: What is the goal of development for the next iteration
Measures: What are measures or Kaizen per dimension with those we believe we will reach the goal
If we talk about agile people often think about scrum or other frameworks that mainly support us in getting more agile in the „Processes“- dimension. This is fine as that's something we easily could adapt and could be a good starting point. However in our opinion agile has much more dimensions.
Source: flowdays, adapted by Philipp Engstler
Culture: the core of 'being agile' is the mindset shift, otherwise we just 'do agile'. Changing the culture is hard as it's just the shadow of the sum of all peoples behaviors within an organization. However, by starting collaboration about our values, good and bad behaviors we could change culture over time too. Definitely the journey of cultural change starts with each person first.
Organization: the people and there behaviors require clear boundaries, structures and roles, otherwise we end up in anarchie. Those might look totally different, more lean, consisting of empowered teams and is compatible with the agile culture and values. Often it happens that the line organization becomes less important over time.
Processes: optimizing the whole along the value stream is the goal. However the processes have to be lean, adaptable and always customer oriented. Therefore we setup rituals, artefacts, etc to foster the collaboration, feedback-loops and transparency throughout the organisation
Excellence: a key success factor are the people with there personal skills (social- and hard skills) and the ability to form hyper productive agile teams. Therefor the teams optimize there excellence towards the whole and look for a continuously improvement in a failsafe environment
Our experience is that transformations that follow an inside-out approach are much more sustainable then the outside-in approach. Downside is, that inside-out is more of a longterm approach and needs more time too. However, we recommend to keep in mind all dimensions during an agile transformation.
We believe having a customized maturity model could be beneficial in areas like e.g. personal-development, team-development, development of business unit or value stream, company development, partner development, customer development, etc
If you’d like to try it out just follow these 9 steps:
Invite participants to a workshop
Define levels & acceptance criterias
Define lead time for an iteration
Define 1 goal & measure per dimension
Review & Update for next iteration
Unless I'm not a big fan of maturity models I believe having a simple, customizable tool that fosters the collaboration will lead to a more learning culture in organizations. What do you think about, I'm keen on your feedback, inputs, experiences from the field!
