When organizations launch an Agile transformation, they usually reach for a standard model that focuses on setting up new team structures and implementing a checklist of team-level practices. With the checklist approach to agile, after a team implements a practice, they simply move on to the next. Some maturity models use a graded system (“level 1” vs “level 2” stand-ups), but they’re still about matching what a team does to what’s written on a list.
Starting with practices, filling up people’s calendars, and installing new structures front-loads the cost of agile. It creates disruption and leads people to think that agile is an expensive joke filled with pointless roles and meetings.
Implementing maturity models isn’t important; what’s important is improving customer fitness. And since customer needs, challenges, and the environment keep changing, fitness has to be continuously monitored, and agile practices continuously re-evaluated.
Why Practice-Based Maturity Models Don’t Work
Maturity models present a clear yet prescriptive path to agility, but they ultimately measure compliance rather than customer fitness. An inherent flaw of these models is that proxy metrics, like compliance, always become the goal. This shifts people’s behaviours towards implementing the required practices instead of achieving the original outcomes.
Maturity models miss what’s important about practices:
- They measure activity, not value: They can show that practices are happening, but they can’t tell you whether they are adding value or acting as performance theatre.
- They ignore context: They can’t tell you when practices make sense for a team’s context. A stable, low-dependency team gets forced into the same cadences as a new team working in a complex domain.
- They ignore team capability: They can’t tell you when teams can adopt practices organically to fix problems, or when practices have to be dictated and installed top-down.
As teams and the environment change, practice-based maturity models can’t adapt.
Measuring Fitness in Context
Fitness is how well a system meets customers’ needs. But as customer needs change, fitness levels need to be continually monitored, and practices need to be adjusted.
But you can’t evaluate team-level ceremonies without a way to measure their impact on outcomes. Without higher-level feedback loops, whatever teams do is just guessing. It’s risky to adopt new ways of working without any idea whether they’re making a difference to business outcomes.
Kanban’s higher-level cadences offer a practical way to check whether team-level practices are supporting the business:
- Service Delivery Review: Are we meeting our commitments to customers? Do our value streams meet their expectations of speed and quality?
- Operations Review: Where’s the friction in our organization? Do we have the capacity to do what we need to?
- Risk Review: What’s blocking the flow of value? Are we managing dependencies or other delivery risks well enough?
- Strategy Review: Does our operational capability match where we’re trying to go?
Without these higher-level feedback loops, team-level agility is just local optimization.
How to Start Solving Outcomes
Most agile transformations start with team-level work. They consider team-level work to be the biggest risk and focus on implementing team-level ceremonies. Because team practices directly affect delivery work, they’re a favourite of managers who love visible, measurable activity.
But you can’t start an agile transformation from the bottom. This is not an issue of who’s involved, but more so of where. While starting agile from the bottom can improve local visibility and performance, team-level agility has a short ceiling in large organizations.
If you don’t start with feedback loops like Kanban’s higher-level reviews, how can you make an informed decision about what practices to implement? Without a clear view of outcomes, risks, capabilities, or capacity, starting with team-level practices is just guessing at the problem.
Instead of starting bottom-up with team structures and team-level practices, think outside-in.
- Install higher-level reviews: Start by setting up the operational, risk, and strategy reviews. Before changing anything, use them to see how work moves through the organization and reaches customers. The reviews will surface issues in lead time, quality, reliability, product impact, customer satisfaction, and business value.
- Understand improvement opportunities: After you identify the issues related to value delivery and customer outcomes, investigate the root causes. Instead of jumping to implementing practices, tie each practice to a clear goal. For example: “Lead time is slow because nobody sees cross-team dependencies until it’s too late.”
- Implement practices focused on impact: Introduce practices only where they directly support those identified business goals. Use the high-level reviews to measure their impact and ensure they’re making an impact.
The goal for management is to create a connected feedback system where customer outcomes drive high-level goals, and high-level goals drive practices. The four Kanban reviews are one way to connect team and organizational activities to customer outcomes.
Avoid treating agile maturity as a static target and trying to reach it through rigid practice models. Internally focused models can’t tell you if you’re improving. You need feedback mechanisms that bridge what your organization is doing and its effect on customers and the outside world.
