One challenge of working with organizational leaders and Agile teams is leaders want to know when a team is considered agile. The question leaders want answered is, “How Agile is the team?”
This is not an easy question to answer on its surface. There are many variables that can affect a team’s level of agility. Below I outline a few variables that all organizations should consider when trying to assess a team’s agility level.
Type of work. Some teams face the same type of work day in and day out. An accounting team that always deals in accounts payable, for example, doesn’t suffer work variability. If the work doesn’t result in mistakes, failures, or opportunities to learn, then a team can only get so “agile.” They’ll start to see diminishing returns early in an agile transformation.
Regulatory constraints. Some teams must appease regulators who may periodically audit the team’s work to ensure the team is following existing laws. A team could develop greater agility if they didn’t have to worry about regulations. Since regulations come in all shapes and sizes, a team may need to spend time documenting processes, creating robust knowledge repositories, and performing internal audits in anticipation of an audit from an outside 3rd party. These activities are wasteful, but necessary to stay in business. Therefore, a team’s agility may be dampened by wasteful yet required regulatory requirements.
External non-agile teams. Many agile teams must rely on external teams for one reason or another. If these external teams are not agile, or do not work in an agile way, then the agile team’s performance will not be what it could be. The agile team must way, often for an extended period of time, until the other team completes their tasks so the agile team can continue.
Poor cross-team coordination. Many organizations have great agile teams—provided those teams work in isolation. Even agile teams can become bottle necks for other agile teams when cross-team coordination is poor. No matter how much something is important to me, it may be of little importance to you. When other teams do not understand the value of a thing, then agility will suffer.
Leadership / managerial problems. Many managers in today’s world are bad at what they do. They learned to be managers by watching other people be managers, or they were trained under a system that prided itself on managing metrics rather than understanding the value of products. These managers are incompatible with agile because they operate under a command and control paradigm. These managers tend to meddle where they shouldn’t and often constrain agility because the managers’ wants do not align with the values of the team.
When it comes to measuring agility, you need to understand where your organization ranks in the above variables. You also need to explore other variables that may be unique to your organization. Doing this work can give you an idea of just how agile your teams may become. This exploration may also give you insights into how you can make changes across your organization to improve team agility.