Hello awesome people. I want to share with you my recent experience and discussion with a senior manager who needs advice on how to measure his organisation agility. His company already invested quite a lot of money to send people to trainings and get them certified, purchased tools and processes from vendors and even hired the most expensive consultants in the market to make his company more agile. He shared me his frustration that he is unsure whether his organisation is more agile or still the same.
Agile is becoming the norm of 21st century. Many organisations want to be agile and gain competitiveness in the market. Some are quite prescriptive in agile, doing all of the rules in the book of methodology given by the consultant. Some organisations follow the pragmatic approach that promotes being agile is more important than doing agile. Whether your organisation takes the pragmatic or the prescriptive approach, how do you know whether your organisation is really agile? Are there any measurements? Are the measurements causing the organisation to inspect and adapt or it is just used as a nice to know reports?
There are many measurements out there. The most common ones I've seen are velocity and burn down charts. However, this metric is a team level metric and it is not helping management to make changes in their organisation. Many metrics are only focused in IT but does not tie it to the business metric.
I share my experience and workflow to use holistic actionable empirical metric in this video to help you identify whether your organisation is really agile or just following the agile mechanics in this vlog.
Don't get lost in the plethora of agile practices and frameworks in the market that keeps on popping up every day and use gut feeling when identifying your organisation agility. Put measurements, inspect & adapt your organisation agility and reap benefits out of agility.
Note:
1. EBM Guide can be downloaded from here.
2. The EBM dashboard mentioned in the video can be downloaded from here.