Stop leading with Agile Maturity Assessments
...start leading by Defining and Assessing Agile Objectives
I have been talking to some folks (customer types) about what they can do after the second or third wave of agile change has ebbed and they still feel like they haven’t made the changes they really wanted – or needed.
When they reach out to folks in the agile community, what they keep hearing is “OK, we feel your pain. For $[x] thousand, we’ll come in and do an agile maturity assessment and identify the areas that need improvement.”
My folks weren’t thrilled by this, and I sense a general level of frustration about this idea.
So what to do? Shockingly, I have a suggestion.
It starts with my basic premise: No company ever made a dollar solely because it was excellent at doing agile practices.
So let’s not sit on the sidelines and abstractly judge the quality of an organization’s agile practices divorced from the real needs the organization has.
For now, I’ll call what I’m suggesting an ‘Agile Outcome Assessment’ – here’s what it looks like.
If they aren’t already, carefully define the strategic goals of the organization. It might be worth it to do a SWOT and validate them.
Next define strategic objectives that move the organization toward those goals.
Then align your current agile practices against your strategic objectives. Bucket them into three broad categories:
1. Agile practices can help [meet this specific objective] right now
2. Agile practices might at some point be able to help [meet this specific objective]
3. Don’t see how Agile practices can help right now
So let’s make believe we have a strategic objective to “shift to near-real time (< 1 day) reporting on inbound logistics for key components (defined list)”
We look at what we’re doing with our Agile practices, and we discover that … nothing touches the group responsible for that report or the source data that will drive it.
So we’d rate that very low – ‘hasn’t started.’
We have another strategic objective to “Reduce manufacturing downtime by 50%”
Right now, don’t see how Agile practices can help – so move to the #3 bucket.
And so on…
At the end, we’d have aligned the agile practices and change within the organization to the strategic goals of the organization. And we’d have assessed whether Agile matters, and where it does, how far along it is and how well we’re doing it.
And when we’ve done that, we’ve begun to map how we can add value to the organization through improving agile practices in specific places in the organization – at which point a traditional agile maturity assessment can potentially tell us what we need to change to improve.
But a generic, org-wide ‘agile maturity assessment’ does nothing of immediate value for the organization. And isn’t delivering immediate value exactly what we’re here to do?
I can tell you that it’s what our clients are expecting.