DevOps Maturity Check – a way to balance autonomy and alignment

What if your autonomous teams are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect? Learn how a simple maturity check can foster real, continuous growth without top-down control.

#1about 5 minutes

Balancing team autonomy and organizational alignment in DevOps

The Dunning-Kruger effect can cause self-organizing teams to overestimate their maturity, creating a need for a structured check to provide alignment.

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Defining the goals and purpose of a maturity check

A maturity check should foster continuous learning, create a shared understanding of DevOps, and promote networking, not serve as a performance management tool.

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Establishing a holistic definition of DevOps

DevOps is defined by three pillars: technical capabilities, a culture of collaboration and responsibility, and standardized processes like the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

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Guiding principles for designing a maturity check

An effective check is a self-assessment focused on generating actions, with public results to encourage collaboration rather than for objective team comparison.

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Separating the check into team and application dimensions

The maturity check is split into two parts to independently assess team-level collaboration and the technical maturity of each specific application they manage.

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Assessing team maturity across five key dimensions

The team check evaluates collaboration, value orientation, team setup (like T-shaped skills), agile ways of working, and how the team manages its ecosystem dependencies.

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Evaluating application maturity with technical capabilities

The application check assesses key technical practices including collaborative development, continuous testing, automated deployment, monitoring, and customer feedback loops.

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The maturity check tool and its positive outcomes

The self-assessment tool is designed for ease of use and has successfully helped both mature teams identify blind spots and new teams begin their improvement journey.