Who Runs an Agile Assessment?

I have been blogging a lot this week about my thoughts behind a methodology for agile assessments. While I have implied it, I haven't specifically answered the question "Who would run the agile assessment process?"

The Team

As I discussed in this post, an agile assessment should first be useful as a retrospective tool, performed by the team itself, with no external agents needed. I could see an assessment format based on a series of questions used to lead a discussion, and this process facilitated by the scrum master or someone else decided upon by the team.

A Neutral Party Withing the Organization

At a former employer, we would do retrospectives a the end of 6-12 month projects (often called a post-mortem, but we hated that term). Following guidance from Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews, we would have those moderated by someone who worked at the company, but was not part of the project team. While this would be a bit heavyweight to do often, I think the "internal but mostly impartial" nature of this kind of moderator is a useful ingredient in the assessment methodology I want to assemble.

An External Consultant

I think there is value in having an external consultant come in and provide an assessment. Someone external to the company can provide a 'visiting professor' point-of-view to the internal processes; a perspective that might not be available within the organization. In the years I have been consulting, I have learned the value of a 'wide' perspective (a perspective across many organizations) as opposed to a 'deep' perspective I had at my old employer (after working for 11 years).

There are several potential downsides to the external consultant though... First is the risk of this becoming an 'implied certification' rather than a rating, as an assessment from Company A will naturally carry more weight from Company B. If used for improvement, thats a good thing. If used for marketing, it can dilute the whole value proposition. Second is the risk of over-commercialization... and I'll talk about that in my next entry.

It Depends on what you want to get out of it

In each scenario above, you'll get slightly different things out of the assessment process. With the closed group, you'll likely get more honesty, but you'll also not be able to escape the 'group-think' that might be leading to some problems in the first place. With the internal, neutral person, you might be able to escape some of the 'group think', but people might be willing to speak less freely. With the consultant, you'll get some perspective on how you might compare to other organizations, but then the 'willingness to speak' might be further curtailed. Of course, the consultant can bring the whole 'marketing' angle to the table too, for better or for worse.

There is No One Answer

If you look at this post in the context of the one about the audience of the agile assessment, you'll see you can create a matrix with "audience" on one side and "facilitator" on the other. In each square of the matrix, you could define the positives and negatives - nor instance, with the team as the facilitator and the team as the audience, they are more likely to use the feedback to improve. With a consultant as the facilitator and a client as the audience, the client might be more inclined to believe the assessment as 'independent'.

It might even make sense to have a different assessment process for each of those boxes, but I'll leave that for further discussion.