I've been visiting the UK a lot recently - at least once per month. On one of those visits, Steve Freeman, took me out to visit a team at Sky satellite broadcasting being run by Simon Baker and Gus Power. They blog at Agile In Action. If you haven't already go check it out and add it to your blog roll and RSS feed. Why? Because these guys are great!

I've rarely seen such a mature and well run agile team. Gus was all apologetic about how they hadn't yet matured to provide the financial metrics to show return on investment against features developed like I describe in my book. The truth is I've never seen a team that could do it consistently. At Corbis we were only partially capable of relating cost and investment to realized value in the market.

I happened to be there the day they were finishing up a weekly iteration and demo'ing to the product owner prior to deployment the next day. Gus and Simon have created an agile team on a floor of a building out in the western suburbs of London. They've moved the business team (product owners) on to the same floor to provide instant availability on-site customers. The development team works in an open environment. Everything is being tracked on white boards. They have a separate room with print outs of metrics and indicators of the team performance.

The team appears to be capable of highly predictable weekly releases and is constantly examining and improving its processes. For all intents and purposes they are a "high maturity" agile team. A team that would exhibit most of the practices required for a CMMI ML5 audit. It's rare to see something like that and Simon and Gus have to be admired for their management prowess. I didn't get to meet their senior management but clearly the leadership at Sky "gets it." I understand that they hope to scale the processes from this one team to a larger organization. Enterprise scalability. The one aspect that would needed to truly claim that Sky is a true "high maturity" agile team. There are very few truly high maturity agile organizations. Sky has the opportunity to become one of them. I wish Simon and Gus good luck and I hope to visit them again in future and see them continue to move up the enterprise agile maturity ladder. Technorati tag: Agile+Management, Software+Engineering, CMMI, Simon+Baker, Gus+Power, Steve+Freeman, XP+London