Agile Assessment

Overview

The Agile Assessment is a short focused effort that through interviews, questionaries and observations will give you a good overview of where you are in your agile journey, and what steps to take next. Based on years of experience, proven best practices and organizational patterns of high performing organizations, the assessment will list a number of improvement points with concrete recommendations for you to try out.

If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.

So in order to improve, you have to keep reinventing yourself. The Agile Assessment can be a valuable input to this process.

Who is this for?

The Agile Assessment is for all teams and organizations in the software development business, who wants to improve.

Maybe you are …

• at the beginning of your Agile Journey? The Assessment can help you focus your implementation effort, highlight pain points and some of the sutler issues of adopting Agile that are often missed.
• down the Agile road for a while? Maybe you need new inspiration. Maybe you are stuck and haven't made any new improvements for a while? Or maybe you simply need a fresh set of eyes to look at your process.
• not started with Agile yet? The Agile assessment can help you see your current process in a new light. And wether you chose to go Agile or not, most of the recommendations can be used in non agile contexts as well.

Why?

Way to often organizations attempt to adopt Agile, but without a deep understanding of the underlying principles. This usually ends up being mostly the old way of working, just with some new names. The project manager is called the Scrum Master, the requirements specification is called the backlog etc., but the overall the behavior is not changed, and the promise of dramatic improvements remain unfulfilled.

The main point of the assessment it to give you a good indication of how well you are implementing a number of proven "best practices" and organizational patterns that high performing agile organizations are using. This will give you inspiration on where to focus your current improvement efforts, and usually also serve to surface root causes of various issues and problems you might be facing today. As the output of the assessment there will be a prioritized list of recommendations of specific actions, practices, or organizational changes that could be implemented in order to improve.

The point is NOT to give you are score of how Agile you are or how well you perform. Being Agile should never be a goal in its own right. So to measure how well you are doing you should measure your expected outcome of your current improvement efforts. This could include : Performance, bug-rate, cycle time, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and retention, etc.

These measures could also be included in the Assessment, if you are not already doing so yourself.

How?

The Agile assessment is based on a number of interviews with key roles and stakeholders, questionaries to all members of the team, and preferably with observations of key project events like planning, estimation, demoing, day-to-day work, and process improvement efforts (retrospectives) if you perform these.

The Assessment will look into both the team, the process and the organization that surrounds it. A systemic approach, and following the Lean principle : "Optimize the whole", is at the heart of the way AgileCoach.dk is working.

The presentation of the results is conducted as a workshop with all team members and stakeholders present. The observations is presented and discussed, the recommendations is presented discussed and prioritized. And finally the team commits to the top 5 improvements that they are willing to work on now. This ensures that you are not just given a list of recommendations – but that they are understood and momentum among all key players is created right from the start.

When and for How Long ?

The Assessment usually takes between 3 to 5 on-site days including interviews, processing the input and delivering the workshop where the results are presented. The duration depends on the size of the team and the organization and your level of ambition.

The Agile Assessment is typically used as a kick-start for an improvement initiative. Typically supplemented with a number of coaching and mentoring activities and workshops.