Agile Capability Assessment

You have already established agile ways of working in your company. You know that agile leadership and an agile corporate culture are essential building blocks for success. Now you need an assessment of where you are, in order to take the next steps to improve, expand or anchor your agile ways of working organisationally. Then why not conduct an assessment of the agile mindset, agile practices and agile leadership at company level, team level and individual level. Find out where you stand and what next steps you should take. We help you with our many years of practical experience from the agile transformation of industrial companies and the agile capability assessment model developed from this.

The agile capability assessment model

For the past nine years, we have been using our own maturity and agile capability assessment model in our consulting projects to systematically evaluate the entire interdisciplinary product development of an industrial company – from strategy, to the various processes, to the organisational structure. We have used this to determine the position of many industrial companies, from which we have defined and implemented holistic improvement programmes.

This experience has now been incorporated into an agile capability assessment model for agile working methods and agile leadership, which you can use to assess the skills across five levels you have already acquired:

  • in the company or individual divisions
  • in scaled projects
  • in individual agile teams
  • with your managers

For the assessment system, we draw on our experience from coaching individual agile teams and managers, introducing and adapting scaling frameworks and supporting agile transformation teams. In particular, solutions found for the specific challenges in industrial companies and in the development of mechatronic products are incorporated. For the assessment of agile leadership skills, we use Bill Joiner’s established and proven model with the leadership styles Expert, Achiever and Catalyst Leader. You will benefit from our experience with the 360° assessment derived from this.

The competence fields

To enable a comprehensive assessment of all success factors of agile working, the assessment in competence field 1 begins with the agile self-image, the anchoring of the agile mindset in the corporate culture. This assessment is carried out for the entire company or a company division – either through a survey of a group of representative managers and employees, or through a company-wide survey.

This is followed in competence field 2Agile process organisation” by the practices for successful work with Scrum, Kanban and agile scaling frameworks, as well as their interaction with established company processes. This assessment takes place primarily at team level through interviews or observation.

For companies that have already made changes to their organisational structure or are planning to do so, competence area 3Agile organisational structure” is particularly interesting. This is about changing the actual organisational structure, anchoring responsibility and HR management.

One aspect of central importance for successful agile working is the development of an agile leadership style. Competence field 4 is about exactly that. Here, we offer managers a 360° degree assessment to generate a picture from self-assessment and external assessment and to be able to derive very individual action plans from this. In addition, a brief assessment is made of how agile leadership is anchored in your company.

Good framework conditions enable or facilitate agile working. In competence field 5, you, therefore, assess the physical infrastructure, your IT landscape and also the collaboration models with customers, service providers and suppliers.

Competence area 6Agile transformation” is about how you manage and support the transformation in the long-term.

In total, the assessment system comprises 6 fields of competence:

  1. Agile self-image
  2. Agile process organisation
  3. Agile organisational structure
  4. Agile leadership
  5. Framework conditions for agile working
  6. Agile transformation

These competence fields are further broken down into

  • 23 competence sub-fields
  • 46 areas
  • over 400 practices

Conducting an assessment

There are several options for conducting a skill level assessment. First of all, you can remove individual competence fields or competence sub-fields if the assessment is too extensive for you in the first step, or if these areas are not yet relevant for your company. After that, you have three basic options:

  1. You use the model as it is and let our consultants carry out the assessment.
  2. You adapt the model and map a company-specific model together with us.
  3. You carry out the capability assessment yourself after you have been qualified to do so by our consultants.

Tips from practice:

  • Adopt the agile capability assessment model into the methodology toolbox of your agile transformation team. Perhaps you already have a similar model for your Lean Management that you can now supplement.
  • Make an offer to the teams and managers. You will see that committed teams and leaders will be the first to take up the offer of an agile capability assessment because their drive for improvement is particularly high.
  • “Spread the Word” and use the resulting ripple effect on other teams and leaders. By doing so, you stick to the agile pull principle and avoid unnecessary resistance.
  • Create a dashboard with the KPIs of the agile capability assessment model and track in real-time how your organisation is becoming more agile and how improvement initiatives are working.

Result

Finally, the results of the assessment are presented in a differentiated way. Comparisons of individual company divisions or teams with each other are certainly possible if you wish. In any case, the performance of an individual is not assessed. However, we always recommend that you involve your works council in an agile capability assessment at an early stage.

Once the assessment is completed, the next steps for improvement can be prioritised and planned. The agile capability assessment model also helps here because it clearly describes the capabilities to be achieved and thus also supports a uniform interpretation in the sense of a standard within the company.

The benefit to you

  • You can tailor the scope of an agile capability assessment to your individual needs.
  • You receive an assessment of the situation at company-, team- and management level.
  • You can derive, prioritise and plan the next improvement steps from this.
  • You benefit from our consultants’ experience with the conception and handling of maturity and capability level models.