How to Use Agile Metrics to Measure Your Team and Organization's Agility

Clayton Lengel‐Zigich: Welcome to another episode of the Agile Weekly Podcast, I’m Clayton Lengel‐Zigich.

Derek Neighbors: I’m Derek Neighbors.

Roy vandeWater: I’m Roy vandeWater.

Jade Meskill: I’m Jade Meskill.

[laughter]

What Metrics Can I Use To Measure How Agile I Am

Clayton: We almost forgot you are here. I want to do Agile, and I want my teams to be awesome, and go faster and be better, and do more better. What metrics can I use to measure how good I am at Agile?

Jade: K‐Locks.

Roy: Velocity.

Derek: Velocity.

Roy: I already used that one.

Derek: For me, this is so difficult because in other question I always ask, “What is your company doing?” What are the goals of your company? If you’re doing the Agile, you’re succeeding at things you weren’t succeeding at before in your company, whether that’s making your customers happier, whether that’s achieving some new functionality, or gaining more users or doing something, moving in the market.

But, to me, unless you are a software consultancy that is getting paid to be more agile, why on earth would use any metrics of agility to measure whether you are successful? Being more agile has no purpose if you’re just more agile‐like.

If I’m a thousand percent more agile, but I don’t know what the hell to build with that new agility, what’s the point of being more agile?

Jade: We are talking about problems for developers here. I’ve got to get these developers in shape. Those are problems that I need to worry about. Everything’s cool there. We’re good. Don’t worry about that stuff. The developers are what’s holding us back.

How Do I Know If My Teams Are Agile

Derek: One of the things I’ve started to do a little more, at least at the team level is ask that the direct manager for the teams to say, “How would you know that these teams are better? What are some things that you would know?”

I, basically, right off the bat say, “If your answer is more, better, faster, I’m not interested in helping you.” What we generally started to see are things like, “We want the team to be interacting, more co‐creation to happen. We want it to be easier to on‐board new team members. We want the quality of the code or the technical debt to start to recede. We want more automation. We want to be able to deploy more often.”

There’s still shallow, technical things, but they’re not velocity, or story points, or that we’re doing process X or process Y. There’s something more tangible, like, “Hey, it used to take us three days to deploy the software, now it takes us a day. We’re getting better at being able to do the deployment of the software.”

To me, that’s something, and that’s better than velocity. But to me, great, if you can deploy every 30 seconds, but you don’t have anything worth deploying, what’s the point?

Clayton: I had a manager tell me recently that they wanted to do agile, because they wanted people to stop leaving.

Derek: I’ve seen that in a couple of the value sessions, or goal sessions that I’ve done with managers, where some of it is they identify, they want a culture that is more friendly. I’ve got one team that overtime, lot of overtime, and big pushes for major events are a problem. One of the things they really wanted was more of a sustainable pace.

The reason why is because they said, “We want to stop burning people out because we’re losing good people to it.” I think those are good and noble things from a technical and team perspective. If you’ve got this great sustainable pace, but you’re crappy in the marketplace, you’re not going to be sustainable as a company.

The Only Thing That Matters Is Customer Delight

Jade: That’s why Steven Denning says, “The only thing that matters is customer’s delight.”

Clayton: If I’m kind of some average manager guy, and maybe I read “Lean Startup,” the takeaway for me is you need data and experiments, the scientific kind of thing. Then I talk to kind of the run of the mill agilist, and they say, “Metrics are kind of wishy‐washy, you don’t really need those.” Do you think that’s some of it? Where people think that they need to measure something, and science is so important. I just need and data crunch numbers and have a yes or no binary answer?

Jade: Look at the success of Frederick Taylor and scientific management. It’s build wonderful companies where people want to work...not.

Derek: I think what happens in organizations, they want “organizational agility.” Organizational agility means everybody is “agile.” If I’m the person that’s, ba...