Evaluation of Agile Team Performance

Abstract

The modern business landscape is part of a fast-moving, complex, and globally connected world. The conditions have made the industrial company investigated change from a traditional industrial strategy to a lean-agile strategy, including an adapted version of scaled agility. The former strategy with a hierarchical structure has given former success by standardisations’ economical benefits, but the transition aims to provide future success by managing the new business environment with faster and more responsive product development processes. One of the company’s departments (the product area), consisting of approximately 20 agile teams, has been early adopters in the agile transformation. They have seeked external eyes to evaluate how far they have come and what can be done next to improve the change process. One of the main challenges discussed at the product area regarding the transition from traditional to agile orientation was understanding how to enable empowerment within the agile teams. To seize this challenge, the researchers aimed to suggest improvements based on a qualitative case study of three areas decided as important for high-performing agile teams. To provide improvements, a gap analysis was conducted. The current state and an ideal future state for empowered agile teams at the product area was determined by research question (RQ)1 and RQ2(a). The current state can be generalised into three parts. Firstly, the product area have structures and methods for doing agile, but lacks in individual agile mindsets and cultural behaviors. Secondly, individual conditions for empowerment were aligned with academic success factors for agile teams. Thirdly, scaled agility frameworks are built on the assumption of already having empowered teams. The ideal future state was determined to fulfilled dimensions for teams’ agile success factors, self-organisation, and empowerment. RQ2(b) concludes a gap between these two states and how far the product area has come in their agile teams’ transition. The gap mainly included different dimensions that can be improved to align individual expectations and cultural aspects with the team task and structure. The last RQ3 answers what actions are recommended to reach the ideal future state by reducing that gap, which is important for succeeding with the lean-agile strategy of scaled agility. Conclusively, it was determined that there was no agile 2.0 for all teams. Each team needs to consider where they are today and where they want to be in the future while assuming that the team culture and individual expectations should be aligned with the team structure and task. The researchers have composed three roadmaps that can be used to guide the product area with what dimensions are important to discuss with their iterative team developments. These roadmaps are directed to different stakeholders (the team, the team leaders, and management above team level), with different authority to affect team elements that align with organisational success.