I've been greatly encouraged by the feedback from my Agile 2008 Main Stage presentation. It was so fortunate that InfoQ chose to video it and make it available to a wider audience. I came across this reall detailed summary by Reinout van Rees.

However, there is a brief mention of something I've heard elsewhere. My assetion that a high level of organizational maturity is required to achieve institutionalized enterprise scale agile adoption, is being misinterpretted as me saying teams must seek an CMMI appraisal in order to deliver on their goal of enterprise agility.

from Reinout... In David's opinion, kanban is the method that can help us achieve both agility and high maturity. It will push us forwards. It creates a cultural shift. A shift that allows some teams to reach cmmi level 4 certification.

I am not saying that appraisal is necessary. What I am saying, is that the CMMI is an existing model for organizational maturity. It is a model with 20 years of learning and iteration built in to it. The people in charge of it are still learning and still iterating. My observation of real teams adopting agile is that they appear to more or less follow the CMMI's model of organizational maturity. In other words, level 2 practices appear first, then level 3 and so on. My conclusion from this observation is that the CMMI model for organizational maturity is more or less correct. Close enough to be good enough.

What I've observed with teams pursuing a kanban approach is that it creates a culture suitable for the CMMI generic practices that lead to high maturity. In addition, kanban appears to create an appropriate framework for the practices in levels 2 and 3 of the CMMI model to emerge naturally/organically/spontaneously without the need for a CMMI process initiative. This is a significant win because a common anti-pattern with CMMI is "management by objectives" where the objective is to get an appraisal at a specific level.

Hence, what I am saying is, if we know that a high level of organizational maturity is a key indicator of success with enterprise scale adoption, then it makes sense to pursue organizational maturity as a driver to success. If pursuing organizational maturity is goal then we need not re-invent the wheel. We can follow the model that the Software Engineering Institute has provided us. Getting a CMMI appraisal is not part of the message at all. An appraisal might make sense if you are in a regulated industry, have a business driver for an appraisal such as competing for government contracts. However, appraisal does not enter my message concerning success with enterrpise scale adoption. The message is...

A high level of organizational maturity appears to be essential to successful enterprise scale adoption. There is an existing model for organizational maturity that appears to be broadly correct. That model is CMMI. Technorati tag: David+Anderson agile, CMMI, SEI, Software+Engineering, Management