Measured Growth
Measured Growth
Play Description
Also Known As/Similar To
Kaizen, Metrics and Reporting, Testable Improvements, Health Checks
Pattern Group(s)
Process Improvement
Challenge Categories
Identifying Improvement Areas, Justifying Agile Investments, Ensuring Continuous Improvement
Definition
The “Measured Growth” pattern measures a team’s, department’s, or organization’s agility using an agile maturity assessment, which includes criteria that define agility. This process identifies weaknesses or gaps to be addressed individually. Periodically re-measuring agility helps gauge progress and uncover new improvement opportunities. The Measured Growth pattern addresses the challenge of ensuring continuous improvement and genuine agility within teams, departments, or organizations. Multiple agile maturity assessments are available for this purpose.
Measured Growth involves assessing agility through a maturity assessment that highlights areas for improvement. It aims to provide a structured approach to identify weaknesses, track progress, and justify agile investments through regular, objective assessments. This helps prevent superficial adoption of agile practices and promotes a deeper, more meaningful embrace of agile principles and values.
Regular re-evaluations track progress and identify new opportunities, supporting continuous improvement. Various assessments like Comparative Agility and Agility Health offer frameworks for these evaluations. For example, the Squad Health Check Model by Spotify provides a comprehensive approach to assess team health and identify growth areas.
In Frameworks
In the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Measure and Grow helps organizations gauge their current state and progress towards business agility using various maturity assessments. These assessments guide strategic planning and decision-making.
Periodically, agile maturity is re-measured to gauge progress and identify new opportunities to improve.
How to Use:
- Schedule Regular Assessments: Conduct agility assessments periodically to maintain continuous improvement.
- Select Appropriate Metrics: Choose metrics that align with your organization’s goals and agile practices.
- Facilitate Honest Feedback: Encourage transparency and honesty during assessments to ensure accurate results.
- Analyze Results: Review outcomes to identify strengths and areas for improvement.
- Implement Improvements: Develop action plans based on findings and track their implementation.
There are many different agile maturity assessments. See the list under “notes” below.
Use When…
A “Measured Growth” play is best used when one or more of these situations are occurring:
- Uncertain what to do next. Though your team, department or organization is conducting frequent retrospectives, you may be struggling to identify new ways to improve. Because a well-designed agility assessment attempts to be comprehensive and methodical, there’s a good chance conducting an assessment will identify a number of opportunities to improve.
- Leadership needs to justify investment. Often, an organization’s leadership need to justify initial investment in agile or continued agile investment. By conducting an agility assessment, they have data that can justify the need for investment.
- The organization is unlikely to “game” or misuse the data. Surprise! Just like individuals can cheat on exams, the results of agile maturity assessments can be manipulated. Because of this, some organizations will try to manipulate (“game”) the results in either direction. Need to justify more funding? “Game” the agility assessment to perform poorly. Need to show executive leadership that your team is progressing with agile, “game” the assessment to perform better than you truly are.
Do Not use this pattern when:
- Multiple teams operate independently with minimal dependencies. The Measured Growth play is less effective when teams work independently on distinct projects, as a uniform assessment may not yield relevant insights for diverse contexts.
- There is a high risk of “gaming” or manipulating assessment results. If the organization rewards high scores or penalizes low ones, there may be a tendency to manipulate assessment results, undermining their accuracy and usefulness.
- The organization lacks a genuine commitment to using assessment results for continuous improvement. Without a true commitment from leadership and teams to act on assessment findings, conducting these assessments becomes a formality without meaningful impact.
Advantages
There are a number of advantages to the “Measured Growth” play, including:
- Aligns with agile practices. Not only does an agile maturity assessment measure agility, using an empirical approach aligns with agile practices.
- Can more easily recognize progress. As long as the maturity assessment is well-thought and has been used many times, it can more easily identify progress and recognize when it occurs. This can increase enthusiasm and speed progress.
- Helps justify on-going investment. As long as the organization continues to progress, “Measured Growth” can justify on-going investment.
- Increases objectivity(?). Theoretically, a well-designed agile maturity assessment increases objectivity by using a standard set of measures that have been shown to be meaningful for multiple organizations. Quantitative measures are typically better than qualitative, which is why the question mark exists for this bullet.
Disadvantages
Some of the typical disadvantages of the “Measured Growth” play include:
- Over-emphasis on “doing agile”. It’s rare that an agile maturity assessment attempts to measure agile thinking, and it’s unlikely attempts to do so would result in an objective measure. As a result, maturity assessments tend to focus on agile practice, or “doing” agile, to heavily.
- Not really objective(?). Depending upon the criteria used in the agile maturity assessment, it’s very possible that the results are not objective. Particularly when criteria are not quantitative, it becomes very easy to interpret the data in one’s own favor, increasing the subjectivity of the results.
- May be measuring the wrong thing. Organizations that use an agile maturity assessment are at the whims of the assessment designers when it comes to criteria. Because of this, it’s possible that organizations using the wrong assessment – one that is a bad fit – is likely to result in them measuring the wrong thing.
- The Assessment could be “gamed”. Just like individuals can cheat on exams, the results of agile maturity assessments can be manipulated. Because of this, some organizations will try to manipulate (“game”) the results in either direction.
Additional Notes
1. Self-Assessment vs. Third-Party Assessment:
Deciding between self-assessment and third-party evaluation depends on the need for objectivity and how the results will be used. Self-assessments can be effective if participants are honest, while third-party assessments may be necessary for unbiased, credible results.
2. Various Agile Maturity Assessments Available:
Organizations can choose from numerous assessments, such as Comparative Agility, Agility Health, Agile Maturity Model, and SAFe Maturity Assessments. It’s important to select an assessment that aligns with your organization’s specific needs and context.
Sources:
1. Measure and Grow - Scaled Agile Framework. (2023, March 14). Scaled Agile Framework.
https://scaledagileframework.com/measure-and-grow/
2. Agile Team Maturity Assessment - InfoQ. (2021, May 12). InfoQ. https://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-team-
maturity-assessment/
3. Squad Health Check Model - Spotify Engineering. (2014, September 16). Spotify Engineering.
https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/09/squad-health-check-model/
4. Comparative Agility. (2023). Comparative Agility. https://www.comparativeagility.com/capabilities/Ca/
5. Agility Health. (2023). Agility Health. https://agilityhealthradar.com/