Since its introduction to the TECH teams about eighteen months ago, Team Agile Maturity Measurement or TAMM, has become, de facto, an important practice along with regular retrospectives that our teams are using for continuous improvement of their Agile software development process.
Quite a few teams are already familiar with the approach and have made a huge progress in utilizing the TAMM but there are those that have just started recently. In late 2020 our Lean Agile Center of Excellence (LACE), provided new auxiliary materials to make TAMM feasible not only for product development teams but also for service and system teams. Those amendments have increased complexity of the approach and at the same time it achieved a level of flexibility which is very important in such a variative organizational and infrastructure as we have in SPS TECH.
Although, the LACE has extended experience and understanding how TAMM works for the SPS teams, we relentlessly pursue the perfection. Next crucial step is to figure out what is the best way of collecting and tracking statistics and the result of the TAMM sessions for better transparency and traceability.
Every time we do our regular “gemba walk” with the teams and managers, either facilitating the sessions or just soliciting teams’ feedback on their experience with the TAMM method, we always find new opportunities to improve.
Below, you can see the screenshots of the feedback form and how people responded to the survey questions.
We were pleased to have such a positive feedback as the following:
“_…The detailed questions on the worksheet helped us focus on specific areas and drove a lot of good discussion across all aspects of the team’s processes…” or “…We definitely had a good discussion and retrospective that helped our team grow and move forward with some problems…_”,
We must also pay serious attention to the constructive critique, e.g.
“_…Descriptions of some metrics didn’t really match our team / projects set up and usage…” and “…A few categories still caused some confusion for our team. Mainly around the continuous integration/delivery categories…_”,
that confirms that TAMM is a “wild horse” which is quite hard to tame.
TAMM has to become that powerful ally, capable of carrying an Agile team beyond the boundaries of itself. It is a long journey. Are you ready for the next step of taming the TAMM?
Andriy Isayev, Senior Agile Coach Program Management and Learning Services Team
