You cannot improve anything that you cannot measure.
For teams on a Agile transformation journey, they may want to know at how mature they are. While I'm not a fan of ranking teams based on their maturity index (or similar), I think, within the team such assessments can be good starting points to identify what they have to focus on. In such cases, I've found James Shore's agile maturity assessment to be a useful tool.
This is a self-assessment for a team on 5 different sections.
- Thinking - Awareness of what you're doing, why you're doing
- Collaborating - Software development is a team activity.
- Releasing - Pushing the software to production.
- Planning - Don't strive to plan everything upfront. Adapt it as you go.
- Developing - Is not just coding. It is the art of crafting a well rounded software.
Each section has a few questions that carry different weights. Every team member needs to take this assessment individually and plot their score on a spider chart. A collective view of this, can provide immense insights for a team on where they stand. You can classify it into two buckets
- Areas of improvement - a relatively low score in a particular section, from every member of the team is a clear indicator of an improvement area for the team.
- Gaps in understanding - difference in scores for a particular section is a clear indicator of the gaps on how the team feels it is doing.
The team can then brainstorm and come up with action items for themselves.
As mentioned above, the individual scores in themselves are not valuable, whereas the collective view of the team is. Therefore, comparing teams based on these scores does not make sense as well. I strongly believe, the business outcomes should give us the right feedback on the transformation.
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