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Pre-Adoption Assessment
At Tangible Software we believe that extensive pre-adoption assessments are crucial as they help identify the condition of the organizational characteristics needed for the successful adoption of the agile practices. By identifying any weak organizational characteristics before adopting the agile practices the organization is able to mitigate the risks of the adoption process before entering any chaos caused by change (see Figure below ). Tangible’s unique framework for agile adoption uses over 300 different assessment indicators.
Virginia-Satir Change Model
In order to conduct a proper organizational assessment of an organization’s agile potential the following tasks need to be completed
1. Detailed explanation of IT department
To conduct an organizational assessment, the assessor must be familiar with the structure of the IT department as well as the current development process, personnel, and tools. This task is crucial for an accurate assessment and is usually completed with senior management.
2. Preparation for the Assessment
After understanding the structure of the IT department and the projects, people, and tools within, the next is to plan the assessment process. The goal of this task is to select the right representative sample from the organization to assess. This is important for a successful assessment because we are not assessing individual projects and teams, and assessing the entire organization is not a practical or feasible option. If the agile adoption effort is restricted to a pilot project then assessing the pilot project’s team and surrounding organizational perimeter is sufficient.
3. Conducting the assessment
The core task of the agility assessment is to conduct a series of interviews with developers, middle managers and executives (and customers if possible) to determine the presence or absence of certain organizational characteristics needed for the adoption of agile practices. The assessment may take the form of paper survey or an electronic (web-based) survey depending on what the assessor believes is more suitable.
4. Preparation of assessment results
During this task, the assessment indicators are aggregated using special formulas and weights. The results are tabulated and a report is generated. The report will highlight the degree to which the organization is ready to adopt different agile practices. Moreover, the report will highlight the strengths and weakness of the different organizational characteristics needed for the adoption of agile practices. Tangible software uses more than 300 indicators to assess over 40 different agile practices. The table below is a sample of the assessment results for only 6 different agile practices.
Post-Adoption Assessment
During post-adoption assessments the organization is assessed against the five agile values identified by the Sidky Agile Measurement Index (SAMI). To determine the degree the organization has achieved each of the agile values, the assessor uses numerous surveys that comprise of a number of different adherence indicators. From these adherence indicators, Tangible’s experts identify which practices the organization has successfully adopted and hence which values the organization has realized. The diagram below shows a Radar-graph illustrating the results of a post-adoption assessment.
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