A colleague asked me recently for some ideas on how to measure a team’s agile health. Like anything in agile (or in life, really), there are multiple ways to accomplish the objective.
One easy thing to measure is each team member’s satisfaction or happiness. This can be as simple as having each Scrum Master do a quick fist of 5 vote on happiness, with 0 or 1 being miserable, and 5 being very happy. The thing you have to be careful with this metric is that it doesn’t indicate an issue with a team. A low score could be due to an issue with leadership. Perhaps leadership has done something that the team is unhappy with. Perhaps leadership has set a team up to fail by placing people whose personalities just don’t go together. Or, perhaps the team is unhappy with themselves on how THEY are performing.
Mark Griffiths “PMI-ACP Exam Prep, 2nd Edition” suggests an interesting success metric for a team’s agile health - it boils down to 3 simple questions:
* Did the team deliver on what the customer wanted?
* Did the team leadership stay intact?
* Would the team operate in the same process again?
Unfortunately, this is a lagging metric and doesn’t allow you to pinpoint where a problem exists -it simply tells you if a problem exists. But, it’s simplicity does make it an attractive option.
A third approach is to present to the team the 4 values of the Agile Manifesto and ask each member to rate the team or organization on each of the 4 values. This will help you pinpoint where a team is unhappy, but if team members have different opinions of what the 4 values mean (and they will), you will get varying scores and opinions. But, this is pretty simple to do and you can track it over time.
A fourth tool for assessing agile health of an organization is this model called “Agile Fluency”. There are coaches who can come in and “assess” your organization, or you might be able to do it yourself. It’s an interesting model, but I haven’t used it myself. I’ve found more benefit in using it as a model for growing teams and generating ideas around how I can coach them to reach the next level.
The final tool and one that I’ve used for a while now is called Agility Health Radar. It’s not cheap… in money or time. It costs about $1,000 to become certified to facilitate the assessment and an on-going licensing fee to the tool. But this tool provides a clear visual on how the team feels like they are doing and provides them insight on how to improve.
The Agility Health Radar starts with a facilitated survey by a Certified Agility Health Facilitator. This survey lasts about an hour, and with the latest update, provides clear guidelines on how a team scores themselves in various areas such as “Generalizing Specialists”, “Predictable Velocity”, “Creativity”, and “Technical Excellence”. Once the team completes the survey, they then review the results as a team, discuss what they can improve, and raise concerns on impediments to their growth to their leadership team. These “Organizational Growth Items” are then discussed with the leadership team to be discussed and possibly resolved.
There are a number of ways in which an agilist can measure a team’s agile health. The approach you take will depend on your budget and time that you can invest into the approach. I recommend starting with asking the team how they feel they are doing on the 4 agile values. You can expand this to the agile principles, Scrum values, Lean-Agile values, or whatever else the team or organization values. Just like anything in agile, start small, experiment, and iterate.