In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, the need for enterprise agility has become more pressing than ever. The competitive market demands organizations to swiftly adapt, innovate, and respond to dynamic changes. 

Understanding the Demand for Agile in Modern Enterprises

The current business landscape is marked by rapid technological advancements, increasing market competition, and a need for swift adaptation to changing customer demands. Enterprises across diverse industries are navigating a landscape defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

The Essentials of Scrum Maturity Assessment: A User-Centric Approach

The Scrum methodology is consistently known to be powerful for delivering results efficiently. It thrives on adaptability. But, how can you gauge your team's mastery of the methodology?

 What is a scrum master? Many of us have heard the same definitions…process facilitator, teacher, coach, servant leader. While these are all important aspects of the scrum master job, these attributes fall short of describing what the role really means.

In a nutshell, the scrum master role is focused on cultivating engaged, productive, high performing teams. They influence without authority, lead processes over projects, and guide based on a set of values versus a set of numbers. The scrum master role is not easy, but it is one we need now more than ever.

“We have to stop the churn on our teams.”

What is a Scrum Master anyway?

Scrum is hard. Well, the idea is simple enough: Make a plan, execute the plan, and inspect and adapt as you go. However, executing Scrum well is a significant challenge for many teams and organizations. While there are a number of factors that may influence whether or not a team is ultimately successful with Scrum, the effectiveness of the team’s Scrum Master stands out as perhaps the most critical. So, that said, what does a Scrum Master do that is so valuable? 

In part 1 of our two-part series on Agile Leadership Myths, we busted three of the more common tales we have seen prevalent in organizations. Today, we’ll look at three more of these tales of tradition and put them to the test.

Search for leadership books on Amazon, and it will return over 60,000 results. Search for agile leadership books, and you get over 2,000 results. This sheer volume indicates how big the appetite is to grow our leadership capabilities, and deservedly so.

Try to imagine any organized grouping of people being able to function without skilled, competent leadership. The more complex the goals become, the greater the demand for courageous leaders.

At AgilityHealth®, our team has always believed there’s a relationship between qualitative metrics (defined by maturity) and quantitative metrics (defined by performance or flow) for teams. To prove this, a few years ago, we adjusted our Agile team assessments to gather both qualitative and quantitative data. Once we felt we had
sufficient data to explore through our AgilityHealth platform, we partnered with the University of Nebraska’s Center for Applied Psychological Services to undertake a review. The main question we wanted to answer was: What are the top competencies driving teams to higher performance?

When we think of agility, we often think of agile teams. The word "agile" probably conjures up a mental image of kanban boards, sticky notes, and standup meetings. Many companies today have adopted agile practices on their development teams, and those teams have benefitted as a result. They now have increased collaboration, shorter feedback loops, and frequent deliveries. Teams are now able to get more work done quickly, but the problem is the environment around them hasn't really changed. Siloed business units are still competing for teams' time. Conflicting priorities flood team backlogs, leaving them overwhelmed, uncreative, and unclear on their strategic direction.

Teams have become agile, but the organizations around them have not. This is a problem because companies today are trying to do more than ever. Markets are dynamic, customer demands are immediate, and the pace of change is accelerating. In order to stay relevant in today's marketplace, the entire enterprise needs to become agile.