Measure Your IT Agility

It’s the start of a new year and now's the time to act on those resolutions you made (or are thinking about making). Judging from the amount of interest expressed by IT practitioners and coverage in the industry press, I’d say one popular resolution is to become more agile to keep up with the pace of business. Here’s a quick test you can take to see where you are and set a baseline from which to monitor your progress this year.

The idea for this agility test came to me the other day when my wife looked up from an article she was reading in her magazine and asked me if I’d like to take a quick ten question test to measure the strength of our marriage. She smiled and said it would be interesting to see how well I scored. I knew I had no choice but to take the test and could only hope that I’d learned something about relationships in the last decade. I passed, but the test did point out areas where I could improve…

So, would you like to measure your IT agility? It’ll be interesting to see how you score. Here are the ten questions: (Jot down your answers and compare them with my answers at the end of this post; give yourself one point for every correct answer.)

1)      As an IT leader, what is the best way to foster agility in both IT operations and systems development? 

a.      Plan a major campaign, coin a slogan, and kick it off with a department wide series of meetings and speeches

b.      Select an area of the business where IT can make a significant contribution and launch a project do deliver something quickly

c.      Put your staff through agility training workshops

d.      Give your IT group clearly defined performance objectives and the authority to figure out for themselves how they will achieve those objectives

2)      The best IT architecture to support agility is composed of non-proprietary, standards-based, open systems.   Yes/No

3)      The best language for agile system development is:

a.      Java

b.      C#

c.      Ruby on Rails

d.      Fortran

e.      Greek

4)      At the start of an agile system development project it is best to do a detailed assessment of the “as is” workflows and business logic in order to establish exactly what is happening in the current situation.   Yes/No

5)      On an agile project it is important to get the first deliverable into production in:

a.      Six to nine months

b.      About 60 to 90 days

c.      30 days or less

6)      On agile projects it is more important to get working systems into production than it is to document the systems.   Yes/No

7)      What kind of project management practices and procedures are called for to support agile systems development? Can the project teams do their own project management or does there need to be a separate project office group? (Answer with three or four sentences.)

8)      Companies could be a lot more agile if they had suites of systems like ERP, CRM, SCM, BPM and BI that were all from the same vendor and all talked to each other and shared data in real-time.   Yes/No

9)      What are the main skills needed to do agile development? Is it top-notch programming talent, knowledge about the Internet and databases and services oriented architecture? Or is it something else and if so what? (Answer with three or four sentences.)

10)     Is the major benefit of IT agility to allow your company to become more efficient or more responsive? Why? (Answer with three or four sentences.)

ANSWERS ON NEXT PAGE

Continue Reading