Tag: Management

Comparative Agility Assessments | Glossary

Prashant MJ Leave a comment

Definition: 

Clients, Management other stakeholders need to know “How are they doing?”. A business does not need to be perfect, it needs to be better than its competitor, stay ahead of them.  Organisations are not striving for perfection against some idealised list of agile principles and practices, they are trying to be more agile than their competitors. Becoming agile itself is not a goal, producing better products than the competition remains the goal.  Being more agile than one’s competitors indicates organisations ability to deliver better products more quickly and cheaply.

Kenny Rubin and Mike created the Comparative Agility assessment, where  assessment can be based on individual responses to survey questions. Survey responses for the organisation are aggregated and compared against entire database of assessments. This approach assesses on seven dimensions: teamwork, requirements, planning, technical practices, quality, culture and knowledge creation. A comparative nature of the assessment was intended to be its biggest strength, seeing how your organisation compares with other other organisation improvement efforts can be focused on the most promising areas.

Further Reading:
Book: SUCCEEDING WITH AGILE Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn

Dampening Differences | Glossary

Prashant MJ Leave a comment

Definition: 

In a team sometimes bad decisions re mad which are inevitable, or some of this team’s bad decisions were the result of team members not adequately questioning one another. There are insufficient differences exists between team members which needs to be amplified with techniques like probing questions. 

During meetings, facilitators ask questions to pull out dissenting opinions. Questions like what alternative approaches have you considered and rejected before accepting this one? What could go wrong with this approach? What has to go right for this approach to work? What could make us regret this decisions? Is there any information we don’t have that would help us be sure of this? Another good way to amplifying differences is to change how the team makes decisions, is to do opposite if they currently require consensus. Introducing a new team member with significantly more power, experience knowledge. Asking hard questions to ensure different viewpoints are heard, change the team’s decision-making style, encourage dissenting viewpoints. Identify one difference that if dampened would improve team performance. Someone could be removed from the team who would dampen that difference.

Further Reading

Book: SUCCEEDING WITH AGILE Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn