Software process assessments are typically the first step to commencing software process improvement. Small software companies find that many assessment methods are linked to plan-driven improvement models and can be expensive in terms of the resources required. The authors support these claims with statistics from the Irish software industry and present a lightweight assessment method called Adept. Adept unifies an existing plan-driven assessment method and an adapted, risk-based Agility/Discipline Assessment method. Adept has a low resource overhead and does not dictate either a plan-driven or agile process improvement model, making it an attractive assessment method for small software companies. This article is part of a special issue on Software Engineering Challenges in Small Software Organizations.