Assessing Agile pilot projects

As one of the first steps to trying Agile, organisations often attempt one or more pilot projects.

Recognise that when you are running a pilot project, what you are doing is running an experiment.  Given a set of inputs, we are interested in what happens to a set of outputs.

What are the inputs to an Agile pilot project?

• The people involved
• The problem being addressed, in other words, the project context
• The solution space constraints, including both technology and organisational constraints

What are the outputs we should be interested in?

• Project performance, that is, the effect of introducing the change
• Process performance, that is, the success in actually introducing the change

Remember, the objective is to see if the change is effective in improving performance.  It's obviously foolish to say "X didn't work" when we weren't actually successful in introducing X.

Here's a more visual way of describing this: