World Agility Index

Let’s start with an analogy: The Dow Jones is a collection of companies that combined create an expression of the state of the American stock market and the economy overall.

In other words, when people want to understand whether or not the “Market” is up or down from the day before, they will refer to an Index such as the DJIA (or S&P500, Nasdaq, or others). The point is that the Index is a snapshot of the market by which other stocks can easily be compared.

When a given stock is doing well, that is all well and good, but what’s more important is how that stock is doing relative to the market overall. If you bought Google and ended up making 10% year-over-year, that is nice, but you would be disappointed if the market overall was moving at 25% YOY growth in the same period. In other words – performance is relative.

Comparative Agility works in much the same way. Rather than creating some artificial standard (like an Agile CMMI model or equivalent) and state that “thou shall work this way”, we think it’s more instructive to measure how teams out there are actually working and then compare ourselves to them, so we have a practical baseline.

If we find that we are comparing favorably in Technical Practices to the World Index overall – and our score is a 3.8/5 for instance – that may not make us happy, but it helps us understand that this is a challenging area and that others are struggling with the same thing. It also tells us that we should celebrate the success we’re having – after all, if we’re doing better than the World, we’re clearly doing something right!

The Agility Index is thus an excellent way to capture a baseline – a place to start. But the real power of Comparative Agility is to leverage the tool when comparing your organization (the collection and individual teams) to themselves over time. In the end, business agility is about constantly improving the way you work. Comparative Agility is a critical tool to help you drive your organization-wide continuous improvement efforts.

Calculating World Agility Index

At its core, the AWI is an aggregated mean of all the teams that have taken the survey. It is a moving average, however, so the index does get updated over time as teams evolve, but since we’re basing the Index off a large sample set (5,000+ records), you will not see large changes from month to month. This is by design: the AWI is meant to give an indication of how the world works today while limiting the impact of outliers and other extreme data points.