Measuring the Maturity of a New Way of Working

When Delta's content operation shifted from a "ready when ready" model to a structured sprint-based workflow, the team had to build a new way of working essentially from the ground up.

The change wasn't simply a matter of putting existing work into two-week sprints. The team had to define how work would enter the system, how it would be prioritized, when it would be published, how exceptions would be handled, and how the team would work across both internal and offshore content editors.

Once that process was established, a new question emerged:

How do we know whether it's actually working — and whether it's getting better?

I developed a process maturity reporting framework to help answer that question.

The Challenge

The new sprint model represented a significant change in how the organization operated.

The previous "ready when ready" approach allowed work to be handled independently as requests arrived. The new model introduced a defined publishing cadence, sprint-based planning, and a distinction between sprint work and exception work.

Sprint work would be incorporated into a scheduled release. Exception work could bypass the normal cadence when circumstances required an immediate response — for example, a legal or compliance issue, a special campaign, or another time-sensitive need.

The team needed enough structure to become more strategic, while retaining the flexibility required of a content operation whose work sometimes simply had to be live.

Leadership had asked the sprint management team to establish and document this new process. After the first quarter of operating under the new model, leadership also wanted to know:

How is the process performing? What have we learned? What should change?

There was no formal measurement framework for answering those questions.

Previously, reporting had largely focused on activity counts — how many requests had been completed, for example. But a request count doesn't tell the whole story. A simple content change and a complex initiative could each count as a single request despite requiring very different amounts of work.

The team needed a more meaningful way to understand the health and maturity of the process itself.

The Approach

I developed a quarterly Process Maturity report designed to provide both a measurement of the emerging operating model and a structured starting point for discussion and improvement.

The report draws on historical Workfront data from the team's sprints and looks beyond simple request counts to provide a more meaningful picture of the work being performed.

The goal isn't to produce a single score and declare the process successful or unsuccessful.

Instead, the report provides a recurring snapshot that allows the team and its leadership to see how the process is evolving over time.

Each quarterly report becomes another point in that history.

Turning Data Into Discussion

A particularly useful part of the framework is the way AI-assisted analysis is used to identify potential areas for discussion.

Using Kiro, I built the report so that it can analyze Workfront data from previous sprints and generate:

• Topics for discussion
• Questions the team may want to consider
• Potential pain points
• Areas where the process may be improved
• Observations about how the process is evolving

These aren't treated as authoritative conclusions.

Instead, they function as an outside perspective on the team's own operation.

During sprint retrospectives, the team can examine the observations and ask:

Does this accurately describe what's happening?

Sometimes an observation may not reflect the full context. Other times, it identifies an issue the team hadn't explicitly considered.

Either way, the AI-generated analysis becomes a useful springboard for a more focused conversation.

This creates a feedback loop:

Operational data → analysis → discussion → process improvement → new operational data

Balancing Process With Reality

One of the more important insights emerging from the work is that process maturity doesn't necessarily mean eliminating exceptions.

A content operation can't always function like a software-development team with a fixed capacity and an immutable roadmap. Sometimes content has to change immediately because of a legal requirement, compliance issue, special campaign, or other urgent circumstance.

The sprint model therefore needed to provide structure without sacrificing responsiveness.

The distinction between sprint work and exception work became an important part of that balance.

The goal isn't to return to the old model of simply taking every request immediately. Instead, the team has established a process that creates a basis for prioritization and planning while retaining the ability to respond when circumstances require it.

That has also given the team greater authority to protect the new operating model — to explain when work can fit into the established cadence and when an exception genuinely warrants a different path.

Impact at a Glance

The Result

The Process Maturity report created something that didn't previously exist: a recurring mechanism for evaluating how a newly established operating model is performing and where it can improve.

It gives the team a structured way to examine:

• How the sprint process is working
• Where friction is occurring
• How the nature of the work is changing
• Whether established practices are holding up
• What improvements should be considered
• What questions deserve further discussion

It also gives leadership a way to see the progress being made in response to the broader organizational shift toward a new model of work.

The reports are archived so that they can be compared over time.

The intention is to build a longitudinal record of the process's evolution rather than treating each quarterly report as an isolated snapshot.

After a full year of reporting, the accumulated data can provide the foundation for an annual retrospective on how the operating model developed, what changed, and where the team can go next.

What This Demonstrates

Operational Excellence

Turning a newly established process into something that can be measured, evaluated, and continuously improved.

Process Design & Governance

Helping define and document a new operating model while establishing clear rules for standard and exceptional work.

Performance Measurement

Moving beyond simple activity counts toward more meaningful measures of work, complexity, and process health.

Continuous Improvement

Creating a recurring feedback mechanism that connects operational data to retrospective conversations and process refinement.

AI-Assisted Analysis

Using AI to surface patterns, questions, and potential issues that can inform human decision-making without replacing human judgment.

Change Enablement

Helping an organization move from an established way of working to a new operating model while maintaining enough flexibility to function in the real world.

The Bigger Lesson

Process maturity isn't about creating a perfect process and then enforcing it forever.

It's about creating enough structure to understand how work is happening — and enough visibility to recognize when the process itself needs to evolve.

The most valuable outcome of this work may ultimately be the feedback loop it creates.

Rather than simply asking whether the team completed its work, we can ask a more useful set of questions:

Is the way we're working getting better? What are we learning? Where are we encountering friction? And what should we change next?

By combining operational data, AI-assisted analysis, and human retrospective judgment, the process maturity framework provides a way to keep asking — and answering — those questions over time.

Tools & Technologies