Agile Organizational Assessments & Change Maps

External insights into how your teams and organization can move towards a more outcome driven approach in their product delivery can be impactful. Often, when everyone is busy dealing with the tyranny of the urgent, it can be a struggle to step back and look with clear eyes as to what is really going on and where to begin with making systemic changes.

To help make sense of things, here are two possible ideas to shed some light on your situation.

Agile Organizational Assessments

The word ‘Assessment’ already has a diagnostic connotation, in that an “external expert” will “assess” at a distance and then provide grading, critiques and actions to be taken. However, if it’s done in a dialogic fashion whereby conversations between the individuals in the system and the facilitator are collaborative; then that outside perspective can highlight new perspectives and insights. This can be accomplished through interviews, artifact reviews, observations or other tactics by individuals in adjacent departments, or someone from the outside.

Change Map

Once the insights are generated, it then becomes a question of how and where to get started. A key thing to avoid is overwhelming an organization with too much Change In Progress, or having change activities at odds with activities already in progress. A handy tool to visualize, design and prioritize your change backlog is a simple Change Map. This provides a shared back drop for working through the various concerns and coming up with an incremental approach that can be revisited iteratively.