Introduction

Bill Krebs is an experienced Agile Coach and practitioner. He’s worked at IBM, as an independent coach, and is now coaching at AllScripts, in Raleigh, NC. He is the sole proprietor of Agile Dimensions, an agile training and coaching firm.

Bill has introduced the notion of an Agile Maturity Index. It’s an agile maturity evaluation framework that can be used to assess and communicate team performance. It established a baseline of performance that coaches and teams can leverage to focus their continuous improvement efforts on.

This is a PDF Overview of the History of the AJI and the implementation: http://www.agiledimensions.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/KrebsAgileJourneyIndex.pdf

In my writing of Scrum Product Ownership AND in my coaching, I’ve found it useful to be able to “quantify” the maturity level of the Product Organization. It helps in communicating gaps and planning for improvement. It also helps in determining whether an organization should even be “going” agile in the first place—assessing if they are even ready for it?

Bill is working on an AJI book as of February 2013. I believe his target for publication is early Q2 2013. I’ve developed this adjunct to the AJI because I like his framework and I felt the “program side” needed a bit more definition.

I hope you find it useful…

Spring 2019 Update

Bill still hasn’t formally published the book and I’m uncertain of any date targets he might have.

I’ve reviewed and updated this version of the extension. I’ve also extended or added to my initial AJI interpretation by adding the following Shu-Ha-Ri interpretation for each of the different characteristics:

Shu level: beginner, novice, needs more prescriptive advice and coaching

Ha level: More experienced, solid skills, more consistent tactics and results, but still learning

RI Level: Expert level, solid skills, but more adaptive or situational in their use, continuous improvement, learning, embrace failure.

The intent is to focus your more on growth and learning across each layer, rather than on evaluating a specific grade or numeric skill level.

This update is intended to compliment the Third Edition of the Scrum Product Ownership book.