An Agile Assessment assesses a company’s ability to deliver products with the agility of an early-stage startup. It measures whether a company has the capacity and competencies required to manage projects with shorter delivery cycles, reduced requirements specifications, and increased customer collaboration. This assessment helps companies make critical decisions about what they need to do differently in order to become more responsive and competitive.
An Agile Assessment measures five dimensions of agility:
- Engineering Practices — does the company use practices such as Continuous Integration, Test-Driven Development, and Pair Programming? Do they have a strong engineering team with good prototyping skills?
- Collaborative Leadership — do managers demonstrate a servant leadership style? Are there strong, dynamic individual contributors from whom the company draws strength and ideas? Does the company have a culture of innovation or agility?
- Product Development — is the company good at building products quickly, with high customer value and low resource costs? Do they work closely with customers to build what they really need? Can they deploy products several times a month?
- Technology — does the company have an infrastructure that allows them to continuously deploy their products? Do they use technologies that allow for frequent releases without creating chaos or instability in the product? Does the company invest in technical debt protection practices such as Feature Toggles, Feature Flippers, and Contract Tests?
- Process Improvement — does the company invest in practices that will support agile development? Do they practice continuous improvement or Kaizen? Do they have KPIs that allow them to monitor their progress and make mid-course corrections when needed?
Agile assessments are not like traditional audits. Agile Assessments do not provide you with a long, detailed list of things to fix or improve. Rather, they give you a quick snapshot of your company’s current abilities and provide recommendations on how to move forward to become more agile.
Agile assessments are performed by consultants who have been trained in the Agile Assessments framework and have experience implementing agile practices in organizations. Agile assessments are great for companies that want to learn more about what it takes to become agile without making large investments in training, building out an entirely new organization, or hiring a team of consultants.
The Agile Assessments framework provides you with the tools necessary to conduct an assessment on your own. The Agile Assessment Report is designed so that it can be used and referred to by managers, teams, and employees. Using the report will result in a more thorough understanding of your organization’s agility than what you would get from an external consultant handing you a list of recommendations.
Why Use An Agile Assessment?
An agile assessment helps managers understand what they need to change to become more agile.
Keeping up with the breakneck speed of technology is hard for any company, especially large companies that have made investments in processes and technologies to support the way they do business today. Becoming agile requires organizations to let go of certain assumptions about how development works because many things are different between traditional IT development and Agile Development.
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