Our entire Product Development organization has transitioned to Agile. Officially. Something tells me that I’m not ready to declare victory just yet. It’s extremely tempting to say “Yes” when people asking me whether we are Agile now. My answer is “we are working within Agile framework” but we are not Agile yet. All 5 teams are gaining muscle memory, getting comfortable with Scrum terminology, roles, ceremonies, artifacts etc. But how do we know whether we are Agile or if not, what needs to be done to reach desired level of agility? That’s where the assessment comes in.
I’ve seen several approaches to Agile assessments. Ones that I discarded focused on process rather than on results and the end results. Understanding that Agile is the means to an end, but not the end itself I have designed an assessment that focused on Agile values, principles and benefits. The idea here is to observe each team for a period of a single Sprint and interview team members as well as observe the process and evaluate the quality of outcomes. Each team would then receive detailed assessment of their “Agile Maturity” and will receive a list of suggestions for improvements. These suggestions will be discussed with the team and SMART action items will be developed.
The assessment that I propose consists of 6 composite Dimensions:
1. Embracing change and feedback2. Predictability and Planning
3. Learning and Adapting
4. Working and Stable Software
5. Technical Debt Control
6. Teamwork and Communication
Each dimension has several Indicators with have different weights that are calculated based on observations and interviews (multiple questions/topics for discussions are associated with a single Indicator).
While Agile Maturity Assessment described above is internal to Product Development organization and is a team by team exercise, we also will be performing a Product Development Maturity that will focus on the vision and the goals we’ve set a year ago (see my earlier post about Vision).
