Let’s stop guessing and start crowdsourcing data and information on this critical topic: Who is using what metrics under which context to what success? Participate in the agile metrics survey now.
Do you want to get this article in your inbox? You can sign up here and join 24k other subscribers
.Imagine you’re a Scrum Master and the line manager of your team believes that the best sign for a successful agile transformation is a steady increase in the Scrum Team’s velocity. Moreover, if the team fails to deliver on that metric something is wrong with the Scrum Team. Alternatively, something is wrong with you as you are the Scrum Master and hence responsible for the team’s performance. (Apparently, not faking agile metrics, or being transparent in this case, does not seem to be valued here.)
Learn more about how to coach these kinds of line managers and help them overcome their preference for the industrial past with a simple exercise on how to cook the agile books.
The Agile Metrics Survey 2020 Design: Usually, we start an initiative or project by defining what success would look like and how we would learn that we are successful. Which immediately points at metrics of all kinds. This approach is not different for any attempt to become agile, to turn into a learning organization—at least it should not be.
The question is which metrics have been proven to be successful in the past to support that approach. In other words: is there life beyond velocity?
Support the design of the Agile Metrics Survey 2020 by submitting your suggestions here.
Is every organization suited to become ‘agile?’ If so: How to measure agility? And if not: Wouldn’t it be great figuring that out before embarking on a futile and expensive journey?
Back in October and November 2017, I ran a survey to identify contributing factors to an organization’s or a team’s agile maturity. In total, 86 people participated. Based on their answers, I aggregated a preliminary taxonomy of agility related factors.
This taxonomy was first presented on the Hands-on Agile Berlin meetup on November 30th, 2017.
On February 3rd, 2018, 20-plus people will join a hackathon to build an agility assessment framework based on this taxonomy. The goal of the workshop is to provide the first version of a tool that empowers agile practitioners to measure agility, be it an organization’s suitability for agile practices or a team’s progress on its path to becoming agile.
The following 70 scrum master theses describe the role of the scrum master from a holistic product creation perspective.
The scrum master theses cover the role of the scrum master from product discovery to product delivery in a hands-on practical manner. On the one side, they address typical scrum ceremonies such as sprint planning, sprint review, and the retrospective. On the other hand, the scrum master theses also cover, for example, the relationship with the product owner, they deal with agile metrics, and how to kick-off an agile transition, thus moving beyond the original scrum guide.
Suitable agile metrics reflect either a team’s progress in becoming agile or your organization’s progress in becoming a learning organization.
At the team level, qualitative agile metrics typically work better than quantitative metrics. At the organizational level, this is reversed: quantitative agile metrics provide better insights than qualitative ones.
