Continuous Improvement Check-In: Your 9-Month Agile Health Report

By the time September arrives, your Agile team has completed three quarters of the year’s journey. It’s the perfect moment to pause, reflect, and make adjustments before the year-end sprint. This 9-month check-in offers a structured way to assess your Agile health, identify bottlenecks, and ensure your processes are primed for Q4 delivery.

Metrics are your early-warning system and performance tracker. Look beyond just velocity — examine lead time, cycle time, throughput, and work-in-progress trends.

Ask yourself: Have delivery times improved compared to earlier in the year? Are there recurring slowdowns or scope changes mid-sprint?

Why now matters: Patterns from the first three quarters can reveal systemic blockers, and September gives you a buffer to fix them before the critical Q4 delivery pressure.

By September, priorities may have shifted, but your backlog might still reflect January’s goals.

Check in with stakeholders: Do your top 10 backlog items still align with business outcomes for Q4? Are there outdated or low-value initiatives consuming focus?

Alignment tip: Use this moment to validate your roadmap against current market, customer, and organisational changes. Misalignment now will amplify waste in Q4.

Agile thrives on sustainable pace — but Q4 often tempts overcommitment.

Ask your team: Are you working at a manageable pace, or are signs of burnout appearing? Do we have enough cross-skilling to handle unexpected absences or demand spikes?

Proactive adjustment: If capacity is tight, consider deprioritising lower-value initiatives now, rather than allowing quality or morale to suffer under Q4 strain.

Continuous improvement only works when feedback is timely and actionable.

Review: How quickly do you gather feedback from stakeholders, customers, and the team? Are retrospectives leading to visible change, or do improvement ideas get lost?

Improve: Experiment with smaller, more frequent retrospectives or introduce in-flight feedback tools (e.g., mid-sprint check-ins) to catch issues early.

Now is the time for a value-stream analysis to pinpoint friction points.

Map the flow: From idea to release, where does work slow down? Is it waiting for approvals, testing, or deployment?

Action: Pick the top one or two bottlenecks and focus Q4 improvement efforts there — solving these will likely have the biggest impact on overall delivery speed and quality.

💡 Final Tip: Treat this September check-in like a pit stop before the Q4 race — small, targeted adjustments now will pay off in smoother delivery and better outcomes by year-end.