The Maturity and Enterprise Era marks Anderson's turn from codifying the team-level Kanban Method to extending it to organizational and enterprise scale. The central intellectual project of this era is the Kanban Maturity Model (KMM), developed with teodora-bozheva and published in 2018, which provides a structured framework for assessing and improving an organization's kanban capability across seven maturity levels.
The scaling question
The kanban-book addressed the team and department level — how a software engineering team or service delivery group could use WIP limits and flow metrics to improve its performance. By 2015, the community had generated substantial evidence that the method worked at this level, but practitioners and organizational leaders were asking the scaling question: how does kanban work at the program, portfolio, and enterprise level? The Maturity and Enterprise Era represents Anderson's systematic answer to this question.
Kanban Maturity Model
The kanban-maturity-model describes seven levels of organizational kanban maturity (0 through 6), from a level-0 state of oblivious chaos through level-6 "global market leader" performance. Each level is characterized by specific practices, policies, cultural norms, and leadership behaviors. The model provides both a diagnostic framework (where are we now?) and a developmental roadmap (what must we change to advance?). Co-authored with teodora-bozheva, the KMM draws on Anderson's observations of hundreds of kanban implementations across organizations of varying size and maturity.
Fit for Purpose
fit-for-purpose (2018) introduced the "fitness criteria" concept — the idea that organizational performance should be evaluated against what actually makes customers choose a service over alternatives. This reframed the Kanban Method's improvement goal from generic flow optimization to fitness for the specific purposes that customers value. The concept of fitness-criteria connects the method's operational practices to business strategy in a way that the kanban-book did not address explicitly.
Upstream Kanban and Enterprise Services Planning
upstream-kanban addressed the pre-commitment phase of work — the exploration, discovery, and option management activities that occur before work items enter the delivery kanban system. Enterprise Services Planning extended kanban thinking to portfolio-level capacity allocation and strategic planning. These concepts were documented in discovering-kanban, which provided practitioners with guidance on implementing discovery-phase kanban systems. Together, these extensions moved the Kanban Method from a delivery management tool to a comprehensive organizational operating system spanning strategy through execution.
Significance
The Maturity and Enterprise Era represents the maturation of Anderson's intellectual project: from a team-level practice (Corbis) to a community methodology (the Kanban book) to a comprehensive organizational framework (KMM, Fit for Purpose, Upstream Kanban). Whether these extensions represent the method's natural evolution or overreach is a question that the Kanban community continues to debate.