Agile Transformation Checklist
Agile Transformation Checklist and Survival Guide: Overview
An agile transformation checklist is a list of priorities, tasks or milestones that can easily be distributed and referenced to ensure that an organization’s agile methods for software practice transformation are in line with the transformation vision. It can also serve as a quick way to gather a useful metric such as determining the progress of an agile transformation. It is also a valuable resource when onboarding a new team member, conducting self-assessments or organizational assessments.
In addition, an agile transformation survival guide, which provides more detail than a checklist, could also be created to enhance the organization’s “tool kit”.
There are many agile transformation survival guides and checklists published for public use and are helpful to reference. When researching examples, content may vary slightly from author to author. Agile transformation is a customized approach therefore references will apply to the audience of the organization. Regardless, these examples can serve as a starting point when creating ones for internal use.
Agile transformation is an evolutionary process, not one with a specific end date. The checklist and survival guide can be created during infancy stages of agile maturity and all throughout transformation growth. These guides should be inspected and updated as needed to ensure they reflect the current maturity level and goals of the organization.
Agile Transformation Checklist: A Must Have
An agile adoption and transformation survival guide will contain detailed information regarding details about adoption plans and process as well as track the agile transformation objectives. It will primarily serve as a “how to guide”. While it serves a great purpose, like many project management tools however, many will find tremendous value in a survival guide while some may find it tedious to update which means it can become outdated fairly quickly.
Some key items to considering when creating an agile transformation checklist are:
Characteristics of a good check list:
- The list is complete and concise
- The criteria is clear
- Criteria is confirmable
- Keep it simple
Ideas and recommendations for content:
- Criteria for measuring the agile transformation progress
Does the check list cover these key questions?
- Is leadership ready for transformation?
- Does the environment support Agile?
- Has the roadmap been created?
- Is there a cadence of meetings for continuous improvements
- Are success metrics defined?
- What are the plans for education and training?
- What are the agile methods for software practice transformation?
Examples:
- "An Agile Organizational Transformation Check List.pdf" by Michael Sahota.
- "Checklist for Agile Success" by Davina Sirisena
Adoption of agile practices should be a part of the agile transformation checklist. While it can be created as a separate checklist, it should also be considered part of the overall agile transformation strategy.
- Agile methods for software practice transformation
- Include activities or milestones for the method the organization will adopt for agile transformation.
- This checklist can be a part of the agile transformation checklist, but primarily is created to support agile transformation.
Example:
- “The Unofficial Scrum Checklist” by Henrik Kinberg
With so much as stake with agile transformations as well as some much invested, time and money, in these transformations it is prudent to devote resources and attention to developing tools that improve success rate of agile transformation efforts. Checklists serve as a device by listing key steps or activities, people are less apt to forget or ignore those items. They also help to ensure that transformation activities are consistent across teams.
How CAST Can Help
- CAST provides measurement solutionsto organizations undergoing agile transformations. These metrics are reported through a set of audience-tailored dashboards that provide visibility for managing complex transformation initiatives.
- Establish a baseline for measuring quality and productivity of application development process prior to agile transformation. The baseline creates factual understanding of the existing state of development process, teams and output to serve as the benchmark for improvement.
- Baseline the key applications along the most important application health parameters to ensure they don’t deteriorate over the life of the agile transformation. This protects critical systems during transformation process.
- Govern and manage risk and quality based on established management criteria and metrics.
- Support continuous improvement through automated, sustainable measurement of application development process output.
- Measure quality and productivity of development process post agile transformation to document improvement and serve as the basis of return on investment