Answer the Why

We’re past the early days of Agile exploration and well into mainstream adoption, but there are still hundreds of organizations who haven’t made the switch. Yours may be one of them. Maybe it’s a shift being prompted by your leaders or maybe it’s one that your team has decided to make on its own. No matter the source for the change, I encourage you to answer the question: Why? Why are you adopting Agile? Answering this questions provides a wealth of value to you, your team, your customers, your leaders and other stakeholders. Introducing a process change as significant as Agile creates disruption in your system. If you can’t articulate Why you are introducing the disruption, you’ll receive lack luster support at best. After all…who wants to put their energy into something they don’t understand?

Measure for the Why

So, you’re organization is in the midst of an Agile transformation and those impacted by it now generally understand Why the change is happening. How then, are you going to determine if you’ve tackled and solved the challenges that prompted the transformation in the first place? You measure it.

The topic of metrics often creates apprehension in the minds of many. I think this stems from experiences in which individuals are given an absolute target and have no say in what the metric should be or whether it is achievable. I can recall experiences of my own that fell into this category. Metrics can be very powerful change agents if utilized effectively.

Transformation metrics should be used to gain insight into the progression of the transformation and whether you are addressing the challenges that prompted your Agile adoption. If these same metrics are used to evaluate your teams, you’ll run the risk of outright resistance to the Agile transformation itself. If you use them as a baseball bat to beat up your teams for not performing…well, who would want to work in that type of organization?

Meaningful Metrics

I have found that these guidelines result in meaningful metrics that teams will support:

Measure the right thing(s) – This seems obvious, but I see teams regularly measuring the wrong thing. Just because you can measure something, doesn’t mean you should. There needs to be a direct link between your transformation goals and your metrics. For example, if poor quality is prompting your Agile adoption, measuring production defect leakage is a more meaningful metric than defect closure rate. You can measure defect closure rate all day long, but does it really tell you that your software quality is improving? Measure over time – Trends offer the best insight into whether teams are moving in the right direction at a fast enough pace. For example, look at your production defect leakage rate over 3-6 months. Is it decreasing at the rate you expect? Measuring improvement over time also re-enforces a culture of continuous improvement; an extremely valuable Agile principle. Change your metrics when improvement stagnates – The value of your metrics will decay over time. Teams will find a way to optimize for a metric at the cost of another. Once you’re seeing sustained improved in one area, move on to the next and start measure it. Metrics should be built from the ground up – I’m not a fan of Mgmt handing down metrics to teams. Teams adopting Agile will be in various stages of competency. So, a metric that prompts improvement for one team might not be valuable for another. Let your teams identify what they will measure and then hold them accountable for producing the metric and responding to it accordingly. And don’t forget to tie it back to your Agile adoption “Why”. Don’t boil the ocean – Focus on a few key metrics at a time. More isn’t better & won’t accelerate the realization of Agile benefits. In the midst of learning new responsibilities and processes, teams won’t have the bandwidth to focus on more than a few meaningful metrics at a time. Measuring everything you can think of creates noise in your system and everyone will just end up ignoring them. Pick a few. Knock them out of the ballpark. And move on. Gamification makes it fun – I know…the word fun and metrics aren’t usually used together in the same sentence. Gamifying metrics through the use of badging and achievement levels creates healthy competition within and between teams. Teams can take pride in calling themselves The Best. The result might also be faster ROI on your Agile adoption investment. The fitness industry figured this out a long time ago and I think it can be applied here also.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that “Working software is still the primary measure of progress”. Additional metrics, however, can provide teams with insight into what’s holding them back from producing working software on a consistent basis. If you aren’t measuring anything as it relates to your Agile adoption, I encourage you to identify some.

I’m interested learning why you are adopting Agile. What are you measuring to validate you are achieving that goal?

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