Towards a framework for assessing agility

As software houses align themselves to serve clients operating in rapidly changing business environments, they start putting more emphasis on increasing their agility. However as a precursor to this, there is a need within an organization to measure and monitor its agility. The clients also would be interested to know the level of agility of their vendors. While the need for an effective metric is well established, the subjective nature of the parameters involved, and the need for some degree of generality makes the task of assessing agility a difficult one. This paper is an attempt to arrive at a quantifiable, scalable framework to measure the same. Apart from giving a framework which can be used to assess the agility of a company, this paper indicates how a detailed sensitivity analysis can be done with respect to the parameters that define agility.