With many organisations investing critical resources – time and money – into transforming their business operations, Agile Ways of Work have become even more crucial in our current disrupted workspaces. Unfortunately, Agile adoptions generate a combination of tangible and intangible results which are often difficult to measure and quantify.
“While the high percentage of teams that practice daily scrum (87%) might suggest a high integration of Agile in daily practices, our experience has taught us that this could be misleading. It is clear that teams are not adopting Backlog Refinement practices as much as they should to ensure that the backlog is in a “ready” state to be committed to by the team.”– The 2020 iqbusiness of Agile Africa report.
The extract above, from the iqbusiness research report indicates that whilst many teams may be performing the recommended ceremonies with Agile/Scrum, these ceremonies may not be leading to the desired business outcomes. Further, the various ceremonies, practices and tools link together to form Agile Ways of Working and a failure in one of them has cascading implications for delivery.
Through our research we have found that investment into Agile adoptions/transformations must generate a positive improvement for the business – as would be expected. Our agile Assurance Accelerator provides a through-and-through inspection of what your adoption is (and isn’t) delivering.
Our iqbusiness Agility team focuses on three crucial areas through independent assurance:
Leadership and their role in delivering customer outcomes.
Culture in the team and the organisation as a foundation for delivery excellence.
Tools, techniques and processes that drive technical and economic efficiency.
The accelerator collects relevant data points from the organisation and teams. The data set comprises a number of dimensions including (but not limited to) Team and Technical practices, Learning Culture, Continuous Self Improvement and DevOps practices. Each data point is designed to measure and quantify the adoption/implementation of Agile aligned practices, tools and techniques.
These data points are then analysed to provide a snapshot of the state/health of the agile adoption. Finally, our experienced consultants create an organisation specific report. This provides recommended steps to address any gaps or blind spots. Partnering globally with leading Agile service providers enables us to design world class aligned recommendations, and with the bonus of specific local context.
Regardless of the maturity of your agile adoption (early-stage adopters or late-stage pursuers) the Agile Assurance Accelerator can help to identify missed steps, pitfalls and easy opportunities to maximise the return on investment.
To book an assessment or to find out more about the iqbusiness Agile Assurance Accelerator, contact the Agile team agility@iqbusiness.co.za
