Improving "A"gile Maturity Index

How to improve “A”gile Maturity Index of your team?

Here are a few tips.

Everything boils down to planning. Focus on accurate planning. That involves learning and debating as many ways of planning as possible.  

Soon you will realize that accurate planning is dependent on accurate estimation. And hence learning Estimation is important. There are many ways of Estimating. Learn as many ways as possible. More the better. Involve all team members to decide which is better way of estimating.  There is lots of material available on internet. But maybe you should join some training for getting certified in Estimation. If that certification needs a yearly renewal fee, then it is even better. There are many meetups where endless discussions keep taking place on this topic. You can take help from these meetups also.

When you pick up a User Story for Estimation, you may realize that 4 developers have 3 different story points in their mind.  Involve everybody in a discussion to reach a consensus. After all, what matters to the market is whether you have reached a consensus or not. 

Even bigger thing which matters to the market is your “Velocity”. If there was no consensus about the SP of the UserStory, you cannot plot the” Velocity” graph. Without the Velocity graph, you will be working in dark for future sprints. In fact, planning the future sprint itself could get stuck. You can avoid that risk by reaching a consensus. 

Another crucial aspect for improving "A"gile Maturity Index is Capacity Planning. Maybe this is the most crucial aspect in your journey to be “A”gile. If you are planning for a 2 weeks sprint, you should carefully plan your capacity. Because 10 working days is a long time, very long time. Without Capacity Planning for those 10 long days, anything can happen. So just before the Sprint planning, hold a meeting for Capacity Planning. There are many SaaS tools available for this. Ideally, you should use a tool for this crucial activity. Maybe the selection of this tool involves some time investment for evaluation etc. But that can be done by forming an evaluation committee. Since Capacity Planning is such a crucial ingredient in “Being Agile”, one should not take any shortcuts here.

For a good Agile Maturity Index, team members must do good Collaboration.  Things like everyone showing Respect to everyone else, and everyone trusting everyone else, and one person empowering everyone else, etc are also important for Agile Maturity Index.
There are many consulting organizations who can help you (for a nominal fee) in such very very complex but extremely important areas.    

There are few other aspects also which determine your “A”gile maturity Index; such as  Sprint-after-Sprint 10% boost in Velocity, and Average number of certifications of members in your team, and whether you cross the 15Min upper limit for daily standup, and  whether you really stand (or sit) in your daily stand-up, Etc.
But for any team, however good it may be, it is difficult to incorporate all changes at one time. So, it will be wise to go slow. After all everybody agrees that “Being Agile” is a journey.  

Some people say that the Market does not care about your "A"gile Maturity Index.
They also say that the market does not care whether you are "A"gile or not.
Some people even go to the extent of saying that Agility is not the End Objective but a vehicle to reach the End Objective.

All such opinions should be discarded as edge cases. 
It is certainly worth spending the time, effort, & money to assess ourselves and give an "A"gile Maturity Index to ourselves and enjoy the journey.