A Scorecard for Agile Teams
Over the past couple of days we have had Jeff Sutherland in helping us work through some of our scrum impediments and he brought up an interesting, yet simple measurement tool that I would like to expand upon here that can be useful for any organization using agile techniques for business management.
Think of it as a simple balanced scorecard for agile teams. To create the score, you can use a combination of quantitative hard measures as well as qualitative metrics such as surveying your team. Doing this, say on a monthly basis can give you a gut sense on where things are going well and where the team can improve. It can be a valuable part of the retrospective process. This can create discussions that can lead to the identification of team impediments and hence towards ways in which process’s can be adjusted and improved.
The base model consists of 4 components: Velocity, Direction, Sustainability and Quality. I have added a fifth dimension of User/Customer Experience.
The first 3 vectors have an internal focus:
- Velocity: This is the rate of throughput for the agile team typically measured in points or some other measure of output.
- Direction: This relates to how well the backlog is managed, how well thought out the strategy is, and how the team manages instability (changing markets, customer needs, competitive pressures etc)
- Sustainability: In an agile organization the goal is to increase velocity and maintain a sustainable pace. Sustainability can relate to hours, mental overload etc. (see related post on the creativity inflection point)
The last 2 have an external focus:
- Quality: This relates to the quality of the product or service being produced by the team. It can be measured by factors such as defects, service calls, process time etc. Arguably anything that falls into the lean definition of ‘waste’ could fit into this category.
- User Experience: Some may argue that quality vector includes user experience but I feel that they are best thought of as different dimensions. Some metrics such as customer satisfaction (eg Net promoter score) will be influenced by both but they are not always correlated. You can have a very high quality product that produces a very poor customer experience. Having a specific gauge on user experience creates a better balance.
Measuring this over time can give you good view into where things are at, what is getting better and what is getting worse. It can also help you measure against organization priorities. For instance, the team may actually need to sacrifice some velocity to increase on the vector of user experience for some period of time.
What do you think?
