Assessing the Agility of Teams within Mechatronic Product Development

Abstract

Although agile development is increasingly being applied outside software development, the methods, tools and techniques are still new to the manufacturing industry. A major barrier is the difficulty to measure the benefits and limitations. Comparing the working practices of a team before and after implementing agile methods would provide some insights into the applicability and usefulness of concrete methods and tools in the context of mechatronic-product development. Nevertheless, existing agility assessment approaches are subjective, software centered, and/or require previous application of agile methods. The goal of this paper is to provide a holistic assessment of a team’s agility independently of the methods, tools and techniques applied. For this purpose, agile, non-agile and hybrid practices provide a frame of reference to characterize how teams work across 12 project processes (e.g. project monitoring) and five levels of agility.