Metrics are backbone to the successful delivery, know Why and What to measure. | Agile Story 49

You can’t improve what you don’t measure — Peter Drucker

Metrics and measurements are frequently contentious when it comes to decision making. Very often a lack of measurement leads to decision paralysis in the form of profitable ventures and initiatives being shelved or even worse less profitable ventures or initiatives being prioritised.

Almost anything that can be observed in some way can be measured albeit sometimes the measurement may not be very objective. This should not deter us from making an attempt to measure it. This attempt advances our knowledge and can serve as a good starting point.

The key to solving many hard problems is asking the right questions and using the correct tools to solve these problems. We often hear the word “intangible” being used in the context of business problems. While the literal meaning of the word is “unable to be touched; not having physical presence”, it does not necessarily mean it cannot be measured.

Here are some examples:

· Capability to create new products.

· Value of information that can be extracted from raw data.

· Management effectiveness.

· Risk of failure of a project.

These “intangibles” are almost always relevant to some of the most major decisions an organisation needs to make on a regular basis. They could very well even be the single most important determinant of success or failure for a proposed initiative. Nonetheless all such intangibles are measurable and the methods for measuring them are less complicated and more economically feasible than we initially assume.

Therefore the goal of measurement should always be to support decisions in the best possible way.

Some factors to consider while making decisions:

· Decisions are almost always made with imperfect information which has an element of uncertainty.

· Such decisions should be modelled quantitatively. Empirical data supports this and it has been observed that such decisions fare better than unaided expert judgement.

· Measurements inform uncertain decisions.

· To arrive at a decision we will need to measure multiple combinations of things and there will always be many ways to measure them. Nevertheless there will most often not be a way to be perfectly certain.

While it has not been specified explicitly in Scrum, most teams that follow Scrum use velocity as a measure of their productivity. The accepted formula for velocity is to sum up the story points (or other measure of relative size) for all the completed or “done” stories or work items. This approach can be the cause of much anguish.

Let us see if we can take a slightly different approach. All of us will remember from high school physics that velocity is a vector. Unlike speed which is a scalar and has only one component i.e. magnitude, velocity also has another component viz. direction. The direction in this case is informed by asking the question — “Did we actually deliver value to our customers?”. Seeking feedback from customers and adapting based on the feedback is the goal of any product (or service) development endeavour. We do this intuitively in our daily lives e.g. when on a road trip we are always focused on whether we are heading in the right direction (think google maps) and not just how fast we are travelling.

Another great example of a relevant set of metrics for software delivery is the DORA metrics. The DORA core model is a holistic model that captures not just what to measure but also why; in terms of outcomes we can expect as a result.

To conclude, as the quote in the title says “Metrics are the backbone to successful delivery, know Why and What to measure”.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of science. — Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), British physicist and member of the House of Lords

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This is the continuation of sharing our Agile Stories/Thoughts Series. I strongly recommend referring to the links below for previous insightful blogs from our #teamagile in IBM.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are my own and don’t reflect company’s opinion. They should not be considered as an advice or suggestion in any way.