You will almost certainly need to share updates and progress with your leadership at some time if you are the team leader or member of an Agile team. Sprint Metrics misuse or misinterpretation can be very damaging to your team because it can raise a lot of concerns and anxiety among the leadership group, which in turn raises tension among your team members who may feel unfairly scrutinized or criticized. Morale will be low as a result, and your team’s performance will probably suffer. Therefore, it is my aim that this article will offer some pointers and tactics that will help you connect with your leaders more effectively and assist you in moulding them into supporters rather than critics by utilising a sound metrics management strategy. You can enroll at the Agile training online to learn more.
Why does your management care about Sprint Metrics?
We need to first understand the motivations behind this need for data in order to select the suitable KPIs to communicate with your leaders. The management may request metrics for a variety of reasons, so it’s crucial that you are ready to respond to their questions about the data when you present it. Here are a couple of queries to think about that might be helpful:
- Are the managers used to viewing standard health status reports, such as the Red/Yellow/Green status?
- Do the team’s leaders require information to be confident in their team’s performance?
- Is the management lacking trust as a result of the past?
- Are the team’s performance levels accurately reflected by the data?
- Is more background information required to fully describe the story?
You should be in a good position to start preparing the metrics for wider consumption if you can respond to these questions yourself. Although this may seem like a lot of additional effort that you did not plan for, having a strong communication strategy is a crucial skill that many Agile teams frequently overlook and are left to discover the hard way.
Which Sprint Metrics matter most?
Regularly reporting metrics to your leadership team will typically allow a fact-based approach to project delivery, which can be a fantastic advantage for your project team, presuming that transparency is valued and open communication is the norm in your organisation. Let’s first define the goal of the metrics before delving into the particular measures I suggest.
- Share developments to increase understanding.
- To bolster confidence, discuss achievements.
- Make the value being offered clear.
In the end, what matters most to the majority of firms is the creation of value and the fulfilment of consumer expectations. To help your leaders understand the overall impact your team is having, the metrics you share should be directly related to these topics. Here are some fundamental metrics you might want to look at:
% stories completed vs. planned: Not only are there no pure story points (or velocity), but there is also a percentage metric. Reporting pure velocity (i.e., 100 story points finished) is less beneficial than the percentage completed vs planned because discrete velocity provides no context. This is a subtle but significant distinction that some teams may overlook. The meaning of “100 points” Does that make sense? One of the worst applications of this measure, which frequently results in senseless competition between teams and story point inflation, is when managers compare Agile teams to one another only based on tale points completed. The team’s performance in comparison to the original plan can be seen by comparing the percent completion to the projected state, and you can also evaluate the trends over time to see if a team is improving their ability to plan/forecast work.
% stories accepted: Acceptance of work is crucial to monitor because it shows that value has been delivered; of course, this implies that your Product Owner is accurately representing the end users/customers. Your team is a high-performing team if it can routinely attain acceptance rates of 90 percent or higher.
Defect Rate: Organisations frequently overlook the importance of the defect rate because they are more preoccupied with schedule slippage and expense overruns. You can still assess quality and defects and analyse the trend over time to communicate the team’s performance even if they are not creating software products.
User satisfaction: Even though it can be difficult to consistently get direct consumer input, it is important to track this indicator because it will have a big impact on how long your team and organisation lasts. Net Promoter Score (NPS) metrics can offer a quick yet accurate way to learn how your customers feel about your good or service.
Team Happiness: Team morale is a measurement that is frequently overlooked. How content is your group? Do they have the interest and drive to do their finest work? Do they have the resources necessary to produce innovative items? There’s a potential that your team won’t be as inspired as you may imagine if you don’t pay attention to their health, and this may be a risk to your project.
How to handle misuse of metrics
Despite your best efforts, sooner or later, someone significant or in a high-level position within your firm is going to incorrectly perceive the information that your team carefully provided. What action should you take in this circumstance? I believe that spreading awareness via education is the best course of action. To ensure that this important sponsor or stakeholder has the right grasp of the data, you might need to schedule individual 1-on-1 sessions with each of them. Try to resist the need to evaluate your team in comparison to other teams. If you must, make sure to concentrate on business goals and relative percentages rather than absolute values. Keep in mind that your administration is merely attempting to comprehend how things are going, and they require time to absorb and adjust as well.
Conclusion
You might get the impression that you underestimated how much labour deploying metrics would entail. It takes work to create a successful metrics plan, but the risk of not doing so will probably be too significant for you to ignore. We should be careful to concentrate on the proper metrics that will help us deliver the right story at the right time because we are all readily swayed by what we see when it comes to data. Doing so can significantly impact project sponsorship and project success. Check out the Agile certification course to learn more.
