So you want some metrics to measure the progress of your Agile team. Where do you start? To answer that question we need to set a foundation of understanding in place to showcase why certain metrics are more important than others.
First off, it’s also important to note that some metrics are more valuable than others based on your responsibility area. If you operate within the business portfolio area, you may be most concerned the portfolio team’s ability to discover high value business increments that impact the organization’s ROI. A technical delivery manager may be most concerned with the speed of delivery. And a program manager may be focused on delivery predictability so that he/she can provide more accurate forecasts when doing mid range planning.
The second point is, there is no silver bullet. Many Agile metrics are often more subjective than objective. Therefore, precision is difficult to come. For instance, Agile rightly puts emphasis on delivering valuable software. But how do you measure what’s valuable? After all, some features that seemed valuable at one moment in time turned out to be bad ideas. This is the nature of product development. ROI seems like an obvious answer, however often times its hard to directly attribute an increment of value to an ROI metric, like revenue. Therefore measuring business value is subjective at best and often hard to connect ROI measures.
In the following posts we will take a look at the optimal metrics for three different areas of responsibility within an enterprise – Portfolio, Program, and Team.
