Shu-Ha-Ri betekent letterlijk de kata omarmen, afwijken van de kata en de kata loslaten. Welke klassieke Japanse kunst je ook volgt, altijd heb je te maken met ditzelfde onderwijsproces. Het is een unieke aanpak die al sinds eeuwen in Japan bestaat en waardoor vele oude Japanse traditionele kennis bewaard is gebleven zoals krijgskunsten, bloemschikken poppenspel, theater, poëzie, schilderkunst, houtsnijwerk en weven.
[ Akido Parkstad, Martin Fowler of meer… ]
At the customer I’m currently working for I’m part of this team assigned with creating and implementing a organization wide Agile training and coaching program in support of their bigger organization change which includes a broad agile way of working. Exciting stuff, lots of pitfalls for sure, a source for interesting discussions, learning a lot and above all a whole lot of fun. What we as a team ran into during our work was the need for a tool to coach the different teams in a way to let them discover themselves how mature they were with the agile implementation and what they should focus on next.
I remembered David Anderson presenting a radar chart as a way to plot the maturity of a Kanban implementation during the Kanban coaching masterclass I attended. Trying to re-discover some of that I ended up at Christophe Achouiantz website where he describes his approach for using the radar chart as a coaching tool – very cool and some really awesome other stuff on his website as well btw. I was already very enthusiastic about the radar chart approach the first time I heard it, Christophe provided some great hints and tips to add to that.
This same past week a colleague of mine and myself ended up at an Agile Holland meeting where we got talking with a consultant describing his visualization tool for the maturity of a scrum team. It turned out he used the somewhat same technique Xebia used within this organization for visualizing DevOps maturity which is matrix approach/presentation that somehow seems to resonate within the organization a lot better then the radar chart I liked so much 🙂
Anyways – we decided we’re gonna put together an Agile maturity matrix specific for this organization to help the teams measure their progress and plan their goals and as an fun exercise I started to transform David’s and Christophe’s radar charts to a Kanban Maturity Matrix. 
Nothing to fancy – and I wholeheartedly believe that everyone should fill, edit, tweak and tune this to their own specific situation. I think this matrix view is a very powerful way of visualizing and representing a maturity level to a team you’re working with.
For full jpg click the image and the powerpoint (incl. empty matrix) is available here for download – feel free to grab, customize and enhance. It would be great if you would let me know if you do!