Want to know if your projects--traditional or agile--are working well? Want to know if your developers or your testers or any other functional team could be doing better? Want to know if you're organized for success?

An assessmen can help you answer these questions. I have performed process assessments for an entire product development process, project assessments for a particular project (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.

I review your org chart 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.