Agile and Lean Assessments

Assessment Steps Ennova uses assessments to provide an objective view on adoption readiness, maturity of practices and use of principles. Assessments are not intended to be used for comparison purposes as each team/organisation is unique. However, assessments are a powerful way of turning objective observations into actions and to encourage a culture or continuous improvement.

Adoption Readiness

Implementing Agile and Lean within an organisation is difficult. Adoption success depends largely on the willingness of the people to change practices and the leadership to support change. A readiness review considers a wide range of factors including:

- Culture and attitudes
- Skills and experience
- Governance processes
- Work types performed
- Technology and operating constraints
- Team geography

Ennova typically uses a Readiness Assessment early in an engagement to help identify potential barriers to adoption and opportunities for early progress.

Technical Practices

Technical Maturity For software, the use of specific technical practices like Test-Driven Development and Continuous Integration are critical to ensuring quality and sustaining development. Assessing the use of technical practices is essential for teams to identify opportunities for improving quality and the value of their work.

Ennova can provide maturity models for technical practices specific to the Agile software development lifecycle including:

- Requirements capture and analysis
- Design and architecture
- Iterative development
- Verification and validation
- Deployment and migration
- Operational support

Capability and Maturity

Maturity models have received criticism within the Agile community because they can be incorrectly used to focus on process rather than supporting individuals and interactions. However, maturity assessments can be effective in identifying actions for improvement.

Ennova favours the creation of custom maturity assessments because they are more effective in identifying opportunities for improvement. Typically, these assessments are based around self and peer review of specific Agile and Lean practices. This simplifies the assessment process while still providing insight to dysfunction at the principle or value level.