Jeff Sutherland used to characterize gaining Scrum or agile maturity as a team reaching a high-performing (or hyperproductive) state. He shared stories around these teams on his blog and via conference presentations (see references). He’s making the point less today than he was a few years ago, but agile maturity and the inherent results, is still an interesting question.

One of Jeff’s colleagues in 2008-2010 timeframe was Scott Downey. Scott is an experienced agile coach. Here’s the intro to a blog post and paper that he developed in 2008:

Scott Downey, MySpace Agile Coach, has a way of bootstrapping Scrum teams to a high performing state in a company that is about 1/3 waterfall, 1/3 ScrumButt with project managers, and 1/3 pure Scrum with only Scrum roles. Scott consistently takes teams to 240% of the velocity of MySpace waterfall teams in an average of 2.9 days per team member where the team includes the ScrumMaster and Product Owner.