Our assessment services are designed to diagnose processes against best practices of information technology models and standards, with special focus on business goals.
Since 2003, we have been shifting the focus of the assessments from the interview model, which puts the interviewer at the center, to a group activity which resembles a Socratic Circle. In such circles, a set of questions is put forth to a group and they are encouraged to discuss it until they reach a consensual answer. This method scales reasonably, and allows a medium sized organization to include every resource from the beginning of an improvement initiative. Through this method we have managed to conduct process GAP appraisals in relative short periods of time (1-3 work days), with large groups (up to 30 concurrent participants) and in multi-model process environments (ISO 9001, CMMI-DEV, ISO/IEC 20000-1 and Enterprise SPICE) in traditional and agile settings.
We believe that an assessment will probably be followed by an improvement program, so we have been improving our assessment approach to manage risks that may arise from the change process, since the very beginning.
The result of this process is a Gap Report.