At the beginning of February 2021 I started graduating at CAPE Groep in Enschede. After an introductory process, an interesting assignment quickly emerged: developing a maturity model that can measure how well a company is doing in the field of digital transformation in an agile way. The supervisors from the University of Twente were also enthusiastic and so began the graduation adventure that would last eight months.
The first two months I mainly focused on the existing scientific literature in the field of digital transformation, agile and the existing maturity models in this area. This gave me a good idea of the current 'state of the art' and I was able to develop a first concept as a starting step for my own agile digital transformation maturity model. My supervisor from CAPE Groep helped me during this period through the many sparring sessions in which we exchanged ideas about these subjects. In addition, a stand-up took place every Monday in which we discussed progress and bottlenecks.
After two months of mainly delving into the scientific literature, the 'research topic' part of my graduation was finished. The next step, the 'final project', has now started and will take six months. During this period, the main goal was to develop a new agile digital transformation maturity model that fits well within CAPE Group and its environment. During the development of the model, I used insights from the literature found, conducted interviews with CAPE Groep BV employees and held a brainstorming session with CAPE Groep employees. The open, helpful culture within CAPE Groep made it easy to get in touch with the employees and they were happy to help with my research. I think the best part was the brainstorming session, in which three employees and I ranked the components of the maturity model in order of importance. We did this by writing the parts on post-its and sticking them randomly on windows. Then the post-its were put in the correct order based on the opinion and knowledge of the employees.
When the first version of the model was set up, the evaluation cycle started. In this cycle I again conducted interviews to get feedback on the first version. With this feedback I finally drafted the second version of the model. After this I made a tool in Mendix that ensures that my model can also be used in practice. Together with the help of a CAPE Group employee, this tool was set up within three weeks. The knowledge of Mendix among the employees and the helpfulness ensured that I could ask a lot of questions when I got stuck and could set up a valuable application in a short time. With this tool it was possible to perform a scan at companies and to measure and display the maturity of agile digital transformation components.
Finally, I applied the model together with the tool at CAPE Groep and one of its customers. This gave an idea of how the model can be applied in practice within the CAPE Group environment. Employees of the companies used the tool, in which they answered various questions, to measure the maturity of their digital transformation in an agile way. After that, the results were looked at together with the company in order to discuss the next steps to improve the agile digital transformation processes and parts within the company.
The research was finally completed on September 30 and graded with a 9. This is based on the scientific and practical value of the research.
