Many companies want to have business agility, but they are not really following an Agile approach. An agile assessment allows you to evaluate how teams or even organizations are doing in their Agile journey.

While there are dozens of Agile, Scrum and Lean assessment tools, they aren’t useful unless you know what you should be assessing and you have a strategy for how to use it.

It is more important to have an end-to-end assessment model and you may end up using more than one tool in your model.

Recommended Acceptance Criteria

There are four well-understood criteria to measure against. They are:

• Retest reliability: If a team is tested in January and again in April when they start a new quarter, the assessments should show the same results if the team has not made any real changes. If it does, that’s good retest reliability.
• Inter-rate reliability: If you use the same assessment for the same team, but it’s facilitated by different people, you should get the same results; else it would be poor inter-rate reliability.
• Internal validity: If it is clear to you from just looking at a team that they got remarkably better, the assessment should reflect this. That’s internal validity—knowing that the agile improvements are having the effect you desired.
• External validity: If the test is so specific that it will only work with this company or department and would be totally inapplicable anywhere else, that would be poor external validity. If the assessment can apply to multiple places and applications, then it is likely a much better tool than something completely customised.

Assessment Strategy Model

When you plan an agile assessment, there isn’t a single tool or system that will get you to success. Rather there are a number of steps to take.

• You can conduct observation interviews: By asking the same questions to all your stakeholders, you create a view of how the organization is currently operating and where the clear areas of improvement are.
• Get a quick read on agility by asking a number of questions that touch on the basic practices for agile. The output will be a score that allows a basic assessment of the agility of the team or organisation. For longer running Agile teams, a maturity assessment is recommended, like the ‘Agile Maturity Assessment from Comparative Agility‘.
• Share the results. If teams have poor results, instead of sharing the details, consider sharing a summary report with suggestions for improvements. 
• Keep observing while mapping it to the assessment questionnaire and observing how the team performs firsthand. Now that the team has identified areas of improvement you get to see the team in action for an extended period of time.
• Rinse and repeat. True to agile inspect and adapt loops, aim for continuous improvement by checking the team’s progress every 3 to 6 months.

There are numerous assessment tools, some free and some paid.

The objective here is to give you a simple 42-question survey as a free Agile Assessment tool to start with. Click below to download.