If you have these questions:

• Are my projects working as well as they could be?
• Is everyone engaged and as effective as they could be?
• Are my agile projects working?
• Are we organized for success?
• What would it take for us to move to agile?

An assessment can help you answer these questions. I have performed process assessments for an entire product development process, project assessments for specific projects (traditional and agile), and functional assessments to see how a particular functional group is proceeding. I've done an informal assessment of a hiring process.

First, I discuss your concerns with you, specifically to determine the goal of the assessment. Some clients have wanted to improve their speed of product delivery; some have wanted to improve quality; more have wanted to do both. Some clients want a roadmap for a move to agile; some just for product development, some for the entire organization.

Next, I review how you are organized, and we discuss who I will interview. During the one-hour interviews, I gather qualitative and quantitative information about what's really going on in your projects. I ask people how they manage their work and I ask where their concerns are.

If you want to shorten the assessment time even more, I can interview people by job title/function. You won't receive quite the detail as when I interview people one-on-one, but you'll receive useful information.

Before the assessment, I provide you with a list of measures and metrics to collect. If the data exists and your staff isn't sure how to collect it, I will coach them briefly in collection and storage. During the assessment I'll ask people about the data if I don't understand it.

Then I write the report, including derived metrics from your measurements.

I present my results in an interactive report, with short-term and long-term recommendations. I provide specific actions you can select. And, I facilitate your problem-solving/action selection at the end of the report. My clients have used these assessment results to improve a specific aspect of their product development, and to overhaul their entire development process.

My standard assessments take either 5 work-days or 10 work-days. I interview people for the first part of the time. During the middle part, I develop the report. The last day, I present the report and facilitate your action planning. Even when planning an assessment for a large organization where I have to fly from site to site, I try to complete the entire work within three calendar weeks.

Clients have raved about my actionable reports. They also found the facilitation of action steps or problem-selection eased their transition to new ways of thinking and more importantly, working.

Here's a pdf of an excerpt of a report.

Interested or curious? Email me.