Measuring the Maturity of a New Way of Working

When Delta's content operation moved from a "ready when ready" model to a structured sprint-based workflow, the team had to build a new way of working more or less from scratch. This wasn't a matter of dropping existing work into two-week sprints. The team had to define how work enters the system, how it gets prioritized, when it publishes, how exceptions are handled, and how internal and offshore editors work together. Once that process existed, a new question showed up: how do we know whether it's actually working, and whether it's getting better? I built a process maturity reporting framework to help answer it.

The Challenge

The sprint model was a big change in how the organization operated. The old "ready when ready" approach let work be handled on its own as requests came in. The new one brought a defined publishing cadence, sprint-based planning, and a line between sprint work and exception work. Sprint work goes into a scheduled release, while exception work can skip the normal cadence when something needs an immediate response, like a legal or compliance issue, a special campaign, or another time-sensitive need. The team needed enough structure to get more strategic without losing the flexibility a content operation lives on, because sometimes content simply has to be live.

Leadership had asked the sprint management team to establish and document the new process. After the first quarter under it, they also wanted to know how it was performing, what we'd learned, and what should change. There was no formal way to measure any of that. Reporting had mostly been about activity counts, like how many requests got completed, and a request count doesn't tell you much. A one-line content change and a sprawling initiative each count as a single request while demanding wildly different amounts of work. The team needed a more honest way to understand the health and maturity of the process itself.

The Approach

I built a quarterly Process Maturity report to do two things: measure the emerging operating model and give the team a structured place to start a conversation about improving it. The report draws on historical Workfront data from the team's sprints and looks past raw request counts to show a truer picture of the work being done. It isn't trying to spit out a single score and declare the process a success or a failure. It's a recurring snapshot that lets the team and leadership watch how the process evolves, and each quarter adds another point to that history.

Turning Data Into Discussion

One of the most useful parts of the framework is how it uses AI-assisted analysis to surface things worth discussing. Using Kiro, I built the report to 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

None of this gets treated as the final word. It's an outside perspective on the team's own operation. During retrospectives the team looks at the observations and asks whether they actually describe what's happening. Sometimes an observation misses the full context. Other times it names a problem nobody had put into words yet. Either way, the AI-generated analysis makes a good springboard for a more focused conversation, which creates a feedback loop:

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

Balancing Process With Reality

One of the more important things to come out of this work is that process maturity doesn't mean killing off exceptions. A content operation can't always run like a software team with fixed capacity and a frozen roadmap. Sometimes content has to change right now because of a legal requirement, a compliance issue, a special campaign, or some other urgent thing. So the sprint model had to add structure without giving up responsiveness, and the line between sprint work and exception work is a big part of that balance. The goal was never to drift back to taking every request the moment it arrives. The team built a process that gives it a basis for prioritization and planning while keeping the ability to respond when it genuinely has to. That's also given the team more standing to protect the new model, to say clearly when work fits the cadence and when an exception really does warrant a different path.

Impact at a Glance

The Result

The Process Maturity report created something that didn't exist before: a recurring way to evaluate how a brand-new operating model is performing and where it can get better. 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 lets leadership see the progress being made against the broader shift toward a new way of working. The reports are archived so they can be compared over time, because the point is a longitudinal record of how the process evolves, not a string of isolated snapshots. After a full year, the accumulated data can anchor an annual retrospective on how the operating model developed, what changed, and where the team goes 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 building a perfect process and then enforcing it forever. It's about building enough structure to understand how work is happening, and enough visibility to notice when the process itself needs to change. The most valuable thing this work produced may be the feedback loop. Instead of just asking whether the team got its work done, we can ask a more useful set of questions: is the way we work getting better? What are we learning? Where's the friction? What should we change next? By combining operational data, AI-assisted analysis, and human retrospective judgment, the framework gives us a way to keep asking those questions, and answering them, over time.

Tools & Technologies