Agile Anti-Assessment
Teams commonly — for any number of valid reasons — need or want to gauge their understanding of the Agile processes on which they rely. As ScrumMaster, Product Owner, team member, or stakeholder, you might have noted that team sprints don’t feel as kinetic, or as creative, or even as tidy as they did originally.
This kind of staleness arises in any relationship that isn’t constantly and consciously maintained.
To get a sense of what’s going wrong, you could run a traditional Agile assessment, but this would be a mistake. Agile assessments are metric driven approaches to management. In other words, they’re the very thing Agile was created to circumvent. Don’t be fooled by the word ‘Agile’ in the title — there’s little Agile about them.
Agile Anti-Assessment, on the other hand, is a self-organizing, engaging, awareness driven method of identifying team impediments and strengths, and of marking out a path towards continuous improvement.
How Agile Anti-Assessment Works
Our Agile Anti-Assessments are constructed around a series of original exercises we call ‘Build Your Own Scrum.’ During these exercises, Adam coaches teams (of from five to nine members) in actively discovering in which ways they’re struggling with Scrum and why.
During Build Your Own Scrum (BYOS), team members step outside of their daily routines. They externalize the Scrum process to more freely reflect on what’s working for them and what isn’t. It isn’t about reciting terms and regurgitating definitions; it’s about exploring and considering. During a BYOS Agile Anti-Assessment, Adam teases out the truths that help teams to regain their footing.
Teams that partake in Agile Anti-Assessments leave with a backlog of items they need to tackle in order to improve their implementation. They’ll also get a coaching report from Adam noting any particular organizational challenges our coaching surfaced, plus suggested next steps for removing those impediments.
An Agile Anti-Assessment takes four hours. It can be integrated with other coaching or consulting offerings to make up a full day.
Who benefits from Agile Anti-assessment?
{Agile Anti-Assessment} … is not only an effective tool for collaborative, interactive learning, but it’s also a starting point to deeper discussions about the elements of Scrum which challenge an organization the most. It’s one of the best tools in my coaching and training toolbox.
Agile Anti-assessment is appropriate for:
- New teams
- Teams rebooting their Scrum initiatives
- Teams struggling with Scrum
- High performing teams looking to improve
For more information, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
