Driving Process Improvement via Comparative Agility Assessment

Abstract

Rather than striving to be “perfectly agile, ” some organizations desire to be more agile than their competition and/or the industry. The Comparative Agility™ (CA) assessment tool can be used to aid organizations in determining their relative agility compared with other teams who responded to CA. The results of CA can be used by a team to guide process improvement related to the use of agile software development practices. This paper provides an overview of industry trends in agility based upon 1, 235 CA respondents in a range of domains and geographical locations. Additionally, the paper goes further in depth on the results of four industrial teams who responded to the CA, explaining why their results were relatively high or low based upon experiences with the teams. The paper also discusses the resultant process improvement reactions and plans of these teams subsequent to reviewing their CA results.