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:

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