An Assessment of Agility
January 3, 2012
Members of my company‘s consulting team recently went on site at a medium-sized financial organization to take a look at how well they were doing Scrum, and provide a path for improvement. They conducted this in the context of a formal Agile Assessment. I thought the approach was interesting, and it might be useful to share it here. The team conducted interviews and made observations in 5 unique areas –
• Value delivery
• Agile engineering
• Project Management
• Product management
• Environment and Organizational Culture
The investigation also took input on the demographics of the individual project being examined, the stakeholders involved and the competitive/regulatory environment in which the organization as a whole operates. Understanding the context in which an organization operates is crucial to understanding the optimal level of Agility, and thus, the plan of action. Understanding the goals of the organization is particularly important. Not every axis needs to be top-ranked to achieve the company’s goals. In fact, on this particular assessment we found that only one needed urgent attention – Project Management. More on this later.
By the way, the company uses ScrumWorks Pro as its Agile Project Management tool.







