Audit
You don’t need another maturity assessment. You need to know what is stopping value.
An audit looks at the organisation as it actually works, not as the operating model says it works. Real meetings, real backlogs, real decision flows. The output is not a score. It is the list of systemic constraints, and a backlog to remove them.
Three lenses
People
How people actually decide and collaborate
Leadership behaviour, incentives, skills, collaboration, trust and decision-making. What leaders ask for in the meeting, not what the values poster says.
Structures
What the organisation is built to do
Governance, organisational design, funding, decision rights, dependencies, architecture and portfolio structures. Where work waits, and for whom.
Content
What flows through the system
Who the customer is and which job the work does for them. Then strategy, priorities, backlogs, outcomes, metrics and product boundaries. Whether the backlog carries customer problems and outcomes, or tasks and solution scope.
Each lens is read against fixed maturity dimensions — way of working, flow and delivery, customer value, team dynamics, roles, leadership, continuous improvement — to compare, not to grade. The dimensions are the instrument; the constraints are the finding.
Where the evidence comes from
The real events
Paired auditors attend what already happens: daily, refinement, planning, review, retrospective, portfolio and big room planning. Findings start on day one, not at the end.
The real artefacts
Backlogs, roadmaps, budgets, dashboards, decision logs and architecture boards. Where the artefact and the meeting disagree, the meeting is usually right.
Interviews across roles
Short, voluntary, and across levels: teams, coaches, product, architecture, finance and leadership. No finding is attributed to an individual.
The customer’s view
Complaints, usage data, support tickets and churn. Where the customer’s experience and the internal dashboard disagree, the customer is right.
Five days to one sprint on site
Scaled to the size of the organisation and the question. Longer is rarely better: after a point you are documenting the problem instead of changing it.
What you get
- Agile State of Affairs — strengths, gaps, risks and organisational, cultural and technical debt, with do’s and don’ts per level.
- Systemic constraints — ranked by their effect on value flow, with the mechanism behind each one.
- Target operating model and governance recommendations — decision rights, cadence, funding and control, as a proposal for leadership to decide on.
- Transformation backlog — epics as strategic objectives with measurable OKRs, features as outcomes with an owner and acceptance criteria.
- Measurement baseline — a business dashboard for value, flow and organisational effectiveness, so progress can be shown rather than claimed.
- Technology or organisational radar — where it helps the decision.
Questions clients ask
Will this become another report nobody reads?
The main deliverable is the transformation backlog: prioritised, owned and measurable. The report explains why those items are on it.
What if the findings are uncomfortable?
They usually are, somewhere. That is the point of an outside view, and the reason the findings go to leadership and the coaching team together, so the conversation happens once, with everyone in the room.
Can you audit a SAFe or LeSS implementation?
Yes, including whether the implementation is heavier than the organisation needs. A framework is a means; if it costs more coordination than it saves, that belongs in the findings.
What SAFe turns into when it is mapped onto business as usual, element by element: How to save SAFe →
Curious what is stopping value?
An audit takes a week to a sprint and gives you a shared, evidenced picture of the constraints, plus the backlog to remove them.