Using Crawl, Walk, Run and Fly to Measure Team Maturity
Accurately measuring team health and performance can be challenging, especially when establishing consistent maturity levels across teams within an organization.
When we first launched the TeamHealth® Radar in 2014, we used the Tuckman model of Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. The assessment asked teams to rate themselves based on the highest-level behavior for each competency. However, we quickly noticed that many teams, particularly those new to Agile, ranked themselves too high. They lacked the knowledge to recognize what “great” really looked like in practice, resulting in inaccurate self-assessments that didn’t reflect their true team health or maturity.
While teams do progress through the Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing stages, we believed that a more suitable and applicable scale was needed. Our goal was to provide organizations with a consistent, scalable way to assess and support teams in their growth journey, giving them an actionable roadmap for improvement.
Introducing the Additive Scale for Measuring Team Maturity
In 2017, we introduced the Crawl, Walk, Run, and Fly maturity scale for the TeamHealth® Radar and other assessments. This scale is additive, meaning that a team must meet the criteria of the previous stage before moving to the next. We also revised the assessment questions to provide clear examples of behaviors at each stage, removing the subjectivity from self-assessments.
This approach proved to be especially beneficial for larger organizations. Scrum Masters, Team Leaders, and Coaches can now facilitate retrospective sessions more efficiently and accurately assess where coaching and support are needed, ensuring a consistent experience across teams and departments.
