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Why is assessment needed?
Assessment is important to design an approach for agile adoption and helpful for organizations to measure effectiveness. The purpose should be to identify improvement areas and should evolve over the period. But many times organizations have to prepare a budget for agile adoption in advance to get approval for expenses from the board. They engage vendors to perform assessments to estimate costs.
There is no harm in doing it as long as the vendor act as facilitator than judge. Although I personally believe that need of agility should get established before assessment start so result get aligned with need. Only assessment may not help in understanding reality at ground.
Arguments given in support of assessment always get liked with estimation of implementation cost. Some estimate needed for budgetary approval if organization culture demands. Another argument is to design customized training, coaching and mentoring based on reality as every organization culture is different.
How to design an assessment?
What will be the parameters for assessment? I believe at the highest level, the Assessment approach should assesses agility on four dimensions:
Revenue of an organization (Top Level)
Operating cost of an organization (Bottom Level)
Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
Employee Satisfaction (ESAT)
Every further assessments must be linked with above dimensions. Assessment should be helpful in identifying improvement areas (one time/ continuous). Must be owned by leaders and team collectively. Facilitators should help to assess by innovative ideas. Another area needed attention is the way of collecting data. Data should get generate automatically by creative sessions, games and activities etc.
How these assessments can be designed pointing back to above four dimensions?
Enterprise Agility (Top Line, Bottom Line, CSAT, ESAT) – culture, structure, transparency, learning, innovation and social
Suggested activities – Causal loop diagram, Impact Mapping, Skilled Facilitator workshop and some game related to context switching, queueing theory etc.
Business Agility (Top Line, CSAT) – customer engagement, collaboration, time to market, service and revenue
Suggested activities – Impact mapping, game for time to market, empirical process control and prioritization etc.
Team Agility (Bottom Line, ESAT) – team building, automation, innovation, technical Excellency, learning and sharing
Suggested activities – Game related to 5 dysfunctions of team, working without titles, test first vs code first, emergent design and value stream mapping etc.
Samples metrics that can be further modified based on organization culture.
Team Agility:-
Team is meeting daily to assess progress
Team members trust on each other
Team owns success and failure as team
Team owns code collectively and not individually
Team members estimate PBIs collectively
Everyone in team has gone through basic agile workshop
Everyone agreed to work in self-managing team
Everyone understand the value of collaboration
Team conducting regular retrospective to improve processes
Team care about whole product and not just individual goal
Business Agility:-
Everyone from team joining Product Backlog Refinement
Business representative attending Refinement Session
PBIs are ready for development prior to development start
Business representative available for clarification whenever team wanted
Business representative joins Planning session
Team always define clear goal for development during Planning
Business representative understand cost of rework
Business representative care about cost of delay
Business representative measure time to market
Business representative prioritize PBIs based on business value
Technical Practices and Quality:-
Team has adopted Continuous Integration practices
Team write unit test before writing code
Team practice pair programming and peer review
Team automate test for regression and integration testing
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