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Scrum@Scale’s Scaling Heatmap Assessment
Discover how the Scaling Heatmap assessment can help you improve your organization
When launching a transformation initiative in a company, it is normally difficult to find a suitable approach that is flexible enough to fit for a wide range of situations.
Scrum@Scale, the scaling method created by Jeff Sutherland, introduces the Scaling Heatmap, a multi-dimensional analysis. It allows to identify the strengths and weaknesses of an organization, and to visualize the focus areas that require specific attention for the transformation effort to be successful.
Understand the context
The first step is to perform an exercise to understand more about the current circumstances of the organization. While focusing on the big picture, we try to become familiar with both tangible and less tangible aspects. What is the culture of the company like? What does the organization prioritize when creating new solutions? Are there legacy systems?
To achieve this, Scrum@Scale proposes addressing the following 7 questions, and answering them in a horizontal scale, where the two extremes are the elements in brackets below:
- How important is speed of delivery? [Not important ↔ Very important]
- How important is innovation? [Not important ↔ Very important]
- How important is team empowerment? [Not important ↔ Very important]
- Where are teams located? [All co-located ↔ Highly distributed]
- How complex and/or tightly integrated is(are) the product(s)? [Simple/Loosely-coupled ↔ Complex/Integrated]
- What is the timeframe for becoming agile? [Long-term aspiration ↔ Immediate threat]
- How severe are the repercussions of a product defect? [Minor ↔ Severe]
The answers will be useful to inform important transformation decisions. Naturally, you can remove or add further ones depending on the nature of the company.
Once the context is understood, the next step is to perform the Heatmap analysis.
