So you just completed a team Agile Capability assessment, what's next?
Let's leverage the 5 steps from the Agile Retrospectives book:
- Setting the Stage
- Gathering Data
- Generating Insights,
- Deciding What To Do
- Closing the Retrospective
By completing the assessment you completed #2, Gathering Data, and likely started #3, Generating Insights.
In this article, we will look at some other ways to generate insights and decide what to do.
Summary
The next things we recommend you do are:
- Discuss with the team the overall results to generate further insights on the Capability Heatmap
- Leverage the Prioritization page to set an improvement target and determine the top areas of focus
- Capture improvement Action Items for top prioritized Capabilities
- Manage the progress of Action Items on the Actions Kanban board
Capability Heatmap
The Capability Heatmap is a great place to look after your team has aligned on the values for each Capability.
Debrief questions to ask yourself and the team:
- Where is our strength?
- Where are our weaknesses?
- What stands out?
- Any surprises?
- Any aha's as you were completing the assessment (i.e. learnings)?
- Any patterns to dig into?
On the heatmap, all of the items are clickable which will open a side panel with more information about the Agile Capability. From here you can review the description and acceptance criteria used during the assessment, and you can also add Notes or Action Items.
The biggest challenge is deciding what to do next. There are so many different options on what you can do next. This is where the power of Path to Agility can be leveraged on the Prioritization tab. This aligns with the Agile Retrospective step #4, Deciding What to Do.
Prioritization
The first thing to do with your team is have them determine what is the most critical improvement area they would like to focus on by selecting from one of the nine Business Outcomes.
Once you select a target Business Outcome a recommended improvement backlog will be generated for you based on several factors:
- Your target Business Outcome
- The current state of your team (the assessment scores)
- Path to Agility Capability model
Path to Agility provides guidance on which Capabilities would move the needle the most on achieving your desired business outcome and factors which capabilities will help you to get there. This is reflected in the P2A Index score and the prioritized list.
As a team discuss these priorities and see if you agree with the items at the top. You can always override these recommendations by dragging any item to a different place in the order. We recommend at least prioritizing the first 1-3. All items in the list are also clickable and will open the same Capability side panel shown earlier.
We recommend adding Action Items from the side panel to capture the tasks the team is going to take to improve in that Capability area. Each item will be associated with the Capability so that you can review the score once the work has been done. You can also add links in the description if you also want to track in your team's working tracking system (e.g. Jira, ADO, Trello, etc.).
Once you feel you have captured the actions for the top priority items you can view all of the items on the Actions tab in Kanban board.
Actions - Tracking
You can see all of your actions for your team on the Actions tab and here you can keep them updated as your team begins to work on them. This will allow you and your leaders to monitor the progress of your improvement efforts. You can filter this board to just show your team's items. Before your next assessment, you can refer to the items that have been moved to done to inform which areas you should consider reassessing.
And finally, all of this information can be viewed from the Team Dashboard to give you a one-stop location to get to all of the information for a team.
Rinse and Repeat
As with any inspect and adapt model, OODA loops, PDCA, etc., the cycle repeats.
