Measuring Your Progress With "Being"

As for this month’s topic Measuring your progress with “being” agile what should  come across loud and clear  is the  importance of focusing one’s attention on progress-driven measurement not measurement-driven process; using measures that are natural by-products of your emergent and  underlying approach to “being” agile. 

As you frequently inspect and adapt your approach to “being” agile, your progress should be first and foremost measured and evaluated based on the frequency that commercial or operational value is delivered and deployed.

You achieve this by putting the Product Owner (the business or customer representative) in the driver’s seat specific to what is being developed; allowing and enabling  the business to quickly react to changing market conditions and needs.

Your approach to “being” agile should provide frequent visibility, by the Product Owner, into your iterative and incremental development, delivery and deployment of system-software. If the business or customer representative is not, every 2-4 weeks, verifying and validating what you have done, based on the conditions-of-satisfaction they communicated to you, chances are you will not deliver the requisite commercial or operational value.

In addition to frequently measuring the commercial or operational value-added as a means to inspect and evaluate your  progress with “being” agile, sprint/iteration retrospectives and release retrospectives serve as an excellent mechanism to assess teamwork satisfaction. Conducting frequent retrospectives will give you insights into ways you can iteratively and incrementally get better at what you do and how you work as a team

Rowan McCann in his article Agile Teamwork - A stumbling block or a stepping stone to high performance, shares with us that a starting point for agile teams is to understand the nature of the work that all teams need to focus on.   The Team Management Systems Types of Work Wheel identifies eight distinct ‘Types of Work’ that need to be undertaken by all teams, regardless of their industry.  Rowan has found this concept invaluable to “being” agile and delivering on the promise of frequent delivery of commercial or operation value.

Mike Cohn in his article Determining How Agile You Are Comparatively introduces the Comparative Agility assessment (CA). The Comparative Agility assessment is a way for teams and organization to check their progress, either against themselves at a prior time or against a comparative set of benchmark data.

Kenny Rubin and Dr. Laurie Williams in their article Call for Community Input reaches out to the agile community, to tap into the collective wisdom of the agile community to ensure that the Comparative Agility assessment (CA) survey, introduced in Mike’s article, is the best possible survey produced.

William Krebs, in his article Avoiding Pitfalls in Your Agile Transformation, shares with us an eight point checklist that will give you some insights that will help you effectively progress to “being” agile.

If one of your aspirations includes improving or sustaining team morale or increasing agile maturity through an enterprise-wide reward and recognition program, Jochen (Joe) Krebs in his article, From a team to A-Team, should give you some fresh new ideas for 2010.

Have a great reading experience!