The Maturity Score Wasn't the Story: What 13 Teams Taught Me About Delivery Friction
Updated: Sep 26
A few years ago, I ran a year-long program across thirteen delivery teams in a regulated enterprise. We called it the Accelerated Agile Maturity Program.
Today it has a shorter name, AAMP, and a very different shape.
On paper, the results were strong. Across 15 focus areas, the average team score rose from 3.18 in Q1 to 3.51 in Q4. That's a 10.4% improvement in a single year.
I'm proud of that work. But when I look back at it now, the score isn't what I'd lead with.
The more valuable output was what the assessment exposed about where delivery was getting stuck, and why some capable teams didn't move at all.
The score told us teams were improving. The friction told us why some weren't.
What We Measured
Every team was assessed in Q1 across fifteen focus areas, from agile practices and backlog management to business value and continuous improvement. We reassessed in Q4.
Four themes told most of the story:
Team Dynamics grew the most, up 7.3%. Trust and collaboration were turning individuals into working units.
Client Centricity rose 4.8%. Teams were getting closer to what customers actually needed.
Delivery Excellence gained 3.8%. Execution was steadily improving.
Quality barely moved, up only 1.3%.
A few teams stood out. The most improved team gained 0.54 points to reach 3.86.
The highest-scoring team finished at 4.14, at the Expert level.
And three teams didn't move at all.
That last result is where the real learning was.
Where the Friction Was
The teams that stalled weren't short on effort. Most of what held them back sat outside the team.
Regulated testing. A strict QA Center of Excellence governed how testing and validation could be done. I believe that's a large part of why Quality moved only 1.3%. Teams couldn't coach their way around a system constraint. They started building dashboards for visibility, which helped them see the constraint, but didn't remove it.
Scrum Master turnover. Every time a Scrum Master rolled off, continuity reset. The one team that pushed through it did so because an experienced coach stepped in. That wasn't a maturity problem. It was a delivery capacity problem.
Plateaus. Sustainability and Testing/Validation already scored high, then stopped moving. A high score that stops moving isn't excellence. It's a signal that the measure has stopped telling you anything new.
A team can score well on practices and still be constrained by the system around it.
What I'd Do Differently Now
The original plan was sound. We tailored support by quartile: foundational coaching for the bottom 25%, structured feedback loops for the lower middle, advanced collaboration for the upper middle, and mentoring roles for the top. I'd keep that. What I'd change is how we measured and how long we waited.
Measure more often. Two snapshots a year means waiting months to learn an intervention didn't work. Today I'd want signals every sprint, not every six months.
Measure outcomes, not just practices. Maturity tells you how a team works. Leadership funds what gets delivered. I'd pair practice scores with predictability and with whether work still traces back to the objective that justified the investment.
Use AI to surface drift earlier. This is where my thinking has moved the most. In the AI-enabled backlog coaching capability I've been developing, the goal isn't grading story quality. It's tracing intent through the delivery chain and flagging where alignment starts to break down, scored against a 1 to 5 readiness scale.
Treat staffing gaps as delivery risk. Scrum Master turnover wasn't a coaching issue. It was a capacity issue, and it deserves the same attention as any other risk to the plan.
Compress the timeline. A year is too long to find out what's stuck. That's the biggest change in what AAMP became: a 12-week delivery system optimization instead of a year-long maturity program.
Maturity describes how teams work. Leadership funds what gets delivered.
How These Lessons Shaped the Delivery Stack
Looking back, each friction point maps to a layer of how I now diagnose delivery organizations.
Capacity (Layer 1). Turnover in key delivery roles is why Scrum Master and Product Owner as a Service exist. Stable capacity comes first.
The delivery system (Layer 2). Stalled teams and system constraints, like regulated testing, are what AAMP now targets in 12 weeks.
Portfolio governance (Layers 3 and 4). Deciding which teams and initiatives deserve investment is where HPDS comes in.
The original program measured teams. The lesson was that teams rarely stall on their own.
The Question I'd Ask Now
When I first wrote about this program, I closed by asking which teams would rise next.
I'd ask a different question today.
Where is friction keeping capable teams from delivering what leadership funded?
That question points at the system, not the team. And it's one you can measure in weeks, not a year.
Find Where Your Delivery System Is Stuck
The AAMP Diagnostic helps technology leaders identify where delivery friction lives, which constraints sit outside the team, and what to fix first.
Comments