Compliance in an Agile World

Bhushan Rele has more than 20 years’ experience as a project manager and as a management consultant for multiple companies across the globe. He is PMP and certified in ITIL V3 Foundation. He was the Knowledge Lead for the Information Systems Community at PMI.

  Agile  

By Bernadette Dario and Bhushan Rele

Assessing compliance might seem to be a foreign notion in an agile world where individuals and interactions are preferred over processes and tools. But since agile transformations cost money, executives more often than not require feedback on the level and progress of adoption of teams to these new ways of working. How can practice adoption “compliance” checks be incorporated without bringing in the traditional, heavyweight, one-sided compliance audits?

Here are some assessment approaches that can useful…

Individual self-assessment approach
By throwing in some gamification flair, you can have the individuals assess their adoption level on different attributes/parameters, have their agile coaches validate them and post “character sheets” as information radiators. This brings in a visual and feedback-oriented approach.

You can then incorporate awarding of badges to people as they move from one level to the next. Innovators and early adopters can then shine and hopefully serve as motivators to the laggards to step up their game. The advantage of this approach is that it is fun and transparent. The disadvantage is that the approach may be uncomfortable to some individuals who do not prefer to expose their capabilities to others:

Team self-assessment approach
In this approach, the …

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