"Kanban Maturity Model: Evolving Fit-for-Purpose Organizations" (2018, second edition) co-authored with teodora-bozheva, is Anderson's most systematic attempt to describe organizational development as a staged progression. The Kanban Maturity Model (KMM) extends the kanban-method from a team-level practice to a framework for enterprise-level organizational evolution.
The maturity model structure
The KMM defines seven maturity levels (0 through 6), from "Oblivious" (no understanding of workflow or service delivery concepts) through "Congruent" (organizational strategy and service delivery are seamlessly aligned). Each level is characterized by specific practices, metrics, and organizational behaviors that Kanban adoption produces when sustained over time.
This is a significant extension of the kanban-book's scope. The 2010 book described the Kanban Method as applicable to teams; the KMM describes how Kanban adoption propagates through organizations at increasing scales — team, department, business unit, enterprise — and how the practices appropriate at each level differ from those at other levels.
The fit-for-purpose framing
The "fit-for-purpose" concept — developed more fully in fit-for-purpose (co-authored with Alexei Zheglov, referenced as Alexei Zheglov) — plays a central role in the KMM. Each maturity level is characterized in part by how well the organization can define, measure, and optimize its fitness for the purposes its customers need it to serve. Higher maturity levels involve increasingly precise fitness-criteria and increasingly responsive systems for meeting them.
This connection between maturity and fitness criteria links the KMM to Anderson's broader argument that Kanban is fundamentally a service delivery improvement approach, not a software development methodology. The KMM codifies what "improvement" means at each organizational scale.
Relationship to the Kanban Method
The KMM represents a maturation of Anderson's thinking about evolutionary change. The kanban-book argued that WIP limits and flow visualization would surface organizational dysfunction and create demand for improvement; the KMM describes the trajectory of that improvement in systematic terms. It answers the question the 2010 book left partially open: what does a mature Kanban organization look like, and how does an organization get there?
teodora-bozheva's co-authorship reflects the maturity-and-enterprise-era character of the work — Anderson was no longer developing the Kanban Method alone but in collaboration with a practitioner community that had accumulated experience across diverse organizations.
The KMM is taught and certified through kanban-university and represents the enterprise Kanban curriculum that lean-kanban-inc built after the initial community growth period following the kanban-book-publication.