VOICES In the Trenches
Taking
Measures
How to assess your organization’s agility
transformation program.
By Mustafa Dülgerler, PMP
Organizations are spending significant amounts
of time and money trying to improve their agility.
But if project practitioners don’t properly measure the results of these transformation programs,
they’ll never know whether or not they succeeded.
Agility is the ability of an organization to sense
change in its environment and respond quickly
and appropriately, according to PMI’s Pulse of the
Profession®: Capturing the Value of Project Management Through Organizational Agility. Because
changes around us never stop, project managers
have to closely monitor organizational agility programs. The measurement process can be broken
down into to three phases—before the agility
transformation program, during it and after. A
number of quantitative and qualitative measurements can be used, in addition to the ones specific
to your industry:
Quantitative Methods
Return on agility ratios. These are ratios of the
after-agile to before-agile conditions. Examples
include how product delivery time, IT expenses
and operational expenses changed as a result of
the agility program.
Key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs to
measure agility progress could include number of units sold, length of production cycle or
number of people trained. The best practice is
to rank KPIs from different dimensions, such as
priority and criticality.
In the decision-making process, the KPIs can be
evaluated individually. However, it is better to consider them in correlation with the other KPIs. For
instance, an organization could look at whether
employees who’ve undergone the training actually
sell more units.
Organizations should never consider the
selected KPIs as a static list, because business
requirements, customer demands and more will
change over time. Hence, the chosen KPIs should
be reviewed regularly to ensure their validity, priority and necessity. In some cases, additional KPIs
will need to be introduced.
Balanced scorecard (BSC). A BSC can measure
performance from four angles: customer, financial, internal business processes, and learning and
