The Delivering Zone

While an Agile culture shift will allow a team to focus on value, a skills shift is required to enable a team to deliver value.

Daniel Steinberg

2/3/20252 min read

man in maroon long sleeve shirt holding a book
man in maroon long sleeve shirt holding a book

In 2009, Martin Fowler published his seminal article Flaccid Scrum, in which he discussed the phenomenon of Scrum teams' progress slowing after time because of mounting technical debt. In 2010, Robert Martin wrote a similar article entitled The Land That Scrum Forgot (published on the Scrum Alliance Blog with an introduction from Mike Cohn -- no longer available, but Uncle Bob gave a lecture with the same name). Both authors (who are signatories of the Agile Manifesto) emphasized that, without the engineering practices introduced by eXtreme Programming, a code base cannot be maintained, and a team can therefore not, in the words of the Agile Manifesto "maintain a constant pace indefinitely."

In 2012, James Shore and Diana Larsen introduced the Agile Fluency Model (which they revised in 2018). In their model, Shore and Larsen define four "zones" of agility:

  1. The Focusing Zone

  2. The Delivering Zone

  3. The Optimizing Zone

  4. The Strengthening Zone

Standard Agile Team Coaching facilitates a Cultural Shift, generally through the introduction of the Scrum framework. This shift will bring a team into the Focusing Zone, where they Focus on Value. They will see progress through a business perspective and will work on the most valuable thing. But the team will not yet be able to Deliver Value with any predictability. Without modern engineering skills, the team will produce a hyperproductive mess.

Organizations are often reluctant to invest in the skills shift necessary to bring teams into the Delivering Zone. Perhaps the cost (3 to 24 months) is daunting. Perhaps businesses feel that developers are responsible for their own technical skills. Interestingly, the Business Agility focus of the past several years has encouraged organizations to invest in the Optimizing Zone, ignoring the Delivering Zone.

But the hard facts remain. A team that is not fluent in modern engineering skills will not be able to deliver on market cadence, and delivering on market cadence is vital to a sustainable business.

At Agile Tech, we employ proven technical coaching, facilitation and teaching methods to guide your teams to the Delivering Zone. Please let us know how we can help.