Measuring Progress Towards Agility

It's normal to want to determine progress. For example, children who are interested in their position in the continuum of time and space do not get tired of asking, 'Are we here?’

And agile transformation leaders want to know what progress their team is making towards achieving their goals. Unfortunately, it can be quite difficult to measure changes in a team.

How you measure progress and what tool you use to measure it can be overwhelming. Ben Linder, an Agilist has compiled a list of easy-to-find public tools for agile assessment, and there are probably many more private tools out there. So how do you determine if a tool is right for you?

Start By Knowing The Actual Goal

Before choosing a tool for an agile assessment, be clear about your purpose. If you give me a hammer and you don't intend to build anything, all I can do is nail it all day with zero results. An important first step is to know your business goals and how to achieve them efficiently.

Agile Assessment – Acceptance Criteria

If we consider a review a study or a survey, we can rely on four scientific criteria against which to judge:

1.      Retest Reliability: The test on the team first in the month of January then again in March. You know this is no change made by the team. Does the assessment give the same results? If so, it's a good reliability re-check.

2.      Inter-rater Reliability: You review, rate the team A+. Your colleague comes in and rates the same team as D. That would be poor credibility for the raters. If you are using the same assessment on the same team, you should not get two very different results depending on the person doing the assessment.

3.      Internal Validity: Just look at the team to see that they've become incredibly better. Does this assessment reflect that? This is inner validity - the knowledge that the agile transformation program is bringing the desired effect.

4.      External Validity: Is your test so specific that it only works with that company/department/specific system, and won't be fully applicable anywhere else? That would be a bad external validity. If your feedback can be applied to multiple locations and purposes, it's likely a much better source than completely tailored.

What Can Be Measured Using Agile Assessment Tool?

When having the right tool to build the model, you must think about what you will measure. This is the most difficult place to advise as what needs to be measured can vary greatly depending on agile program type, team journey, organization, and more.

But overall, there are a few key areas that are definitely worth exploring:

1.      Product Defining Ability: One of the biggest threats to Agile success is the lack of clarity on backlogs. If the team can't figure out what will be built together, it will never know how it will be built.

2.      Able To Create Effective Plan: So, you've established your product vision and development goals. Great! As you embark on this journey, there are a few things to consider: Are you participating well at all your Scrum events? Is your product backlog easy to read? Are you proactive about letting others know what you’re working on?

3.      Deliver A Test-Proven Working Product: Basically, it's all about being able to be done. As teams evolve, there is talk of technical practices such as test-driven development, continuous integration, and pairing.

4.      Continuous Improvement: If a team cannot learn and act from previous sprints, it will never really improve.

 

Once the development sprint is over, you'll have an idea of whether or not it was successful. You'll get to see your progress and what you're doing well. Your team will get a sense of how you're doing using data from the sprint, and there are several ways of making predictions based on that data.

Using the Agile assessment tool, you will get a better understanding of Agile transformation. Just make sure you have the right data to work on.

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