How to get started on a right note in your Agile journey with an assessment
By Bachan Anand / Filed under Uncategorized / May 26th, 2010
Just like everything else ,it is key to start off in the right foot when you are considering an Agile adoption in your organization. I believe a transparent assessment on where you are would go a long way in getting started on the right note .
Assessment is key because it clearly paints a picture of the change an organization is going to face to be successful.A great assessment will help everyone start their Agile journey and making a choice in their journey with a clear understanding on what they are getting into both the values and the challenges.It would be best to have the assessment done with involvement from the management , teams and customers.
I want to divide the key assessment areas into two categories , Relationship(or)Communication and System(or) Engineering Practices.
Relationship/Communication
- What is the team structure and how well does it promote communication.
- How often does the customer interact with the team .
- What kind of management style is adopted in the organization .
- Does the management feel that the team is engaged and excited about what they are working on.
- How well does the team get along and gel together.
- Does the team have trust in management.
- Who does estimation of the work that needs to be done
System
- Who is responsible for prioritizing what goes in each release and who determines business value.
- Is business value used for prioritizing features that go into a release.
- What measures are used by the team to have repeatable test – Unit Test / Functional Test.
- What tools are used for requirements and defect management
- How clear and to the point are you requirements, do they focus on what and why or how?
I am sure there are more, I believe this is a good start.
Related posts:
- ADP – Rob Myers – test driven development:: Paying and Preventing Technical Debt
- Last One Year: A Note with Gratitude and Hope
- 78 Things learned in Agile Journey by Jean Tabaka
- Why Vision,Goals and Belief in a team are key to the success of an agile adoption.
- My Thanksgiving Note to All
- Agile and PMI – How about making a difference together?
I would say that assessment is crucial when you have to-down approach to implement agile. On the other hand there is a lot of bottom-up effort in the area and then you don’t really need to assess the whole organization. You don’t even need to look at the big picture.
What you need to do is to build a plan how your transition should go in a way which shouldn’t affect the rest of organization. You may say this is an assessment too, but done in a very different scale.
Bottom-up agile adoption just happens in completely different manner than top-down. The key goal there should be integration with old-school part of the company.