Agile Team Assessment – how can we improve further?

Regular retrospectives are a vital part of Agility – on leadership and team level. Questions like “Where are we now””, “What works well, what not, how to we achieve our goals?” and “how can we address this?” usually lead to continuous improvement.

But what, if retrospectives always read the same, the process of continuous improvement is stuck or what if the team wants to take benefit from practices like DevOps, automation and scaling, but doesn’t know how? Does this sound familiar to you? At this point it can be beneficial to get an external view with concrete next improvement actions.

Our approach

We don’t do assessment in the ivory tower, but together with the team. Simply because:

“People don’t resist change, they resist being changed. People don’t resist their own ideas”

• In its simplest form we do the Agile Team Assessment as a team retropsective, 2-4 hours effort, moderated by us. Sometimes it’s already sufficient to bring fresh air into a retrospective by applying different techniques like Retro Starfish, Value Stream Mapping, Open Space or Toyota Kata. The participants often identify improvement measures by themselves. Where needed and required, cwe can also bring concrete actions from our experience.
• In a more extended form we do first interviews with team members, individually or as a workshop. We orientate our questions along dimensions, which are vital for the success: Approach and processes, tools and methods, people and culture. Based on that, we create an assessment report with the status quo and recommendations.