EFFECTIVE TEAM SELF IMPROVEMENT (SI) METRICS [#TeamSelfImprovementMetrics #TeamSIMetrics #AgileNewsAndViews]
The determinant metrics are grouped into 6 key areas:
- The key enabler – best practice and tool use
- Sprint disciplines and consistent delivery of sprint goals (Scrum Agile)
- Proportion of time spent/velocity/efficiency of writing new features (productive coding)
- Quality and failure rates
- Proportion of time spent/efficiency of bug fixing and re-work
- Teamwork, team wellness and the ability to collaborate effectively
Some of the most common and meaningful metrics around which a team can build an effective self-improvement (SI) program:
1. Overall SI goal metrics:
Metric: Lead Time, Cycle Time
Good measures of overall Time to Value
2. Best practice and tool use:
Metric: Speeding tickets (%)
Tickets that have been moved through multiple Statuses (e.g. in Jira) after the event (so there is no real visibility of workflow stages)
3. Timing accuracy:
Metric: Total Sprint Completion (%)
Percentage of completed story points for a given sprint(s). The factor takes into account story points added once a sprint has started.
4. Productivity:
Metric: Flow efficiency (%)
Percentage of time spent active versus inactive within a workflow
Metric: Return rate (%)
Percentage of tickets returned from QA (for whatever reason) during the dev process. This generates Rework
Metric: % Time bug fixing
Percentage of time a team spends bug fixing versus feature contribution.
5. Team Wellness
Metric: Team Happiness Team Sprint Effectiveness Rating
Individual engineers polled each Sprint/cycle by Plandek using a Slack integration
The aim is not to compare these metrics across teams. Instead the key aim is to track improvement over time within the team itself. Leadership teams need to remain outcome focused, while enabling and empowering teams to identify and make incremental improvements that will improve those outcomes.
Target setting
1. Internal benchmarks:
Measures taken from the most mature Agile teams and centers of excellence within the organization
2. External competitor/comparator benchmarks
Some tools provide anonymized benchmarks across all metrics from similar organizations
3. Agile best-practice benchmarks
Often hard to achieve but are obvious targets as the SI program develops.
The SI program leader / sponsor can view progress against these benchmarks and look back over the duration of the program to view the rate of improvement.
ADAPTED FROM
The Importance of Metrics to Agile Teams
InfoQ.com