What is an agile assessment?
Agility isn’t a finite state that an organisation can set and forget. It’s important to regularly question the current status of your business’ agile framework. The goal of an agile organisation is agile maturity, so agile maturity assessments are implemented to discover where the team is on the sliding scale of metrics from immaturity to maturity – the ‘agile maturity level.’
What are some of the reasons for carrying out an agile assessment?
An agile assessment gives a definitive answer on exactly how agile a company is and it highlights opportunities for continuous improvement. It also allows a company to track the current state of its agile transformation against its objectives. It identifies areas that most need improvement and the coaching support required to achieve it. Once you understand the current state of the business, you have a baseline from which to move forwards. Subsequent retrospectives can assess how you’ve progressed from that point.
Originating in software development, Agile methodology can work across a wide range of companies. Agile processes provide a different mindset from the current state, seeking a general improvement over traditional project management.
What does an Agile assessment consist of?
Generally speaking, agile assessments will uncover the agility of your team or organisation. Different types of assessment can be performed, depending on whether you’re starting out or if you’ve already begun your agile journey. There are multiple agile assessment tools designed to reveal comparative agility, to measure competencies and agile maturity, or to set benchmarks and specific deliverables. Results are delivered in real time. Here, we outline the various types:
Agile ready assessment
This agile assessment determines how ready a business is to begin its agile journey. It’s suitable for a company that is just starting the development process to business agility. This form of assessment takes into consideration many factors, including those people and initiatives within an organisation that will encourage agile adoption and enablement, and those that will hinder it.
Agile maturity assessment
This agile assessment tool benefits stakeholders and product owners, new team members and project managers. For those already undergoing agile transformation, an agile maturity assessment is a useful tool to measure the culture, structure, processes and organisational dynamics within a business. It helps to identify improvement efforts that would aid agile development. This spans practices including project user stories, workload estimation, backlog work and daily scrums hosted by a Scrum Master.
Agile assessment sub-sets
Within the scope of agile readiness and agile maturity assessments, there are also different types of delivery that can work with continuous integration, each serving a different purpose. You may want to measure specific factors like speed, predictability or product quality for example.
The ad-hoc agile assessment
To provide a single snapshot of your business agility, a one-off ad-hoc agile assessment can offer insight into either your agile maturity or your readiness. This provides a view of your business from a third party perspective that you can use to adjust your strategy. Questionnaires and roadmaps might be developed, or Agile principles reviewed overall so that the company’s Agile maturity model improves in the next project lifecycle.
Ongoing agile maturity assessments
Usually used by companies that are fully engaged with the agile transformation process and the benefits it provides, an ongoing agile assessment is exactly what it sounds like. It’s regular, scheduled agile maturity assessments that help to tweak the ongoing strategy as it occurs. This is usually carried out by an external assessment body, to begin with, but can be replaced by an internal self-assessment, once your organisation or team becomes more familiar with agile practices.
Agile assessment & specific agile manifestos
When an organisation wants to focus on either the agile readiness or maturity of a specific part of its business, a specific area agile assessment can be performed. However large or small the Agile team may be, certain areas can be targeted, with recommendations for improvement efforts being provided along the way. It may look specifically at the scrum team, their workflows and development process, for example.
What are the benefits of an agile assessment?
Wherever you are on your agile transformation journey, agile assessments are an important tool to help you gauge your progress and direction. It stands to reason that assessments are a good idea, as you can’t get to where you want to if you don’t know where you are, to begin with. They embody the agile principle of continuous improvement and iterations of change.
Perform regular agile assessments and you get the framework for success, with a constant guiding hand to keep you on track. For that reason, they should be part of any organisation’s agile transformation.
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by Krishna Chodipilli | May 26 2023 | Agile Methodology, Leadership Tribe
