5 Useful Metrics for the successful adoption of agile ways of working

Naveen Kumar Singh
Agilemania
Published in
3 min readJan 10, 2022
Useful Metrics for the successful adoption of agile

In Agile terms, leaders are accountable for optimizing the value of work. As a leader, choosing the right metric plays an important role. They give insight into our team’s productivity and how efficient they are. These help us reflect our image, our loopholes, and how we can make our users feel satisfied. Today the major issues lie in choosing metrics. A metric has an eagle eye and spends more time acting upon the data found by it. Hence, it depends on the motive for which you’re using it. It may be attracting customers, ideas for new features, etc.

Here are some key metrics that can help forecast performance and allow the leaders to perform their job much-renewedly. So let’s check it out!

Work-In-Progress

WIP — Work In Progress measures the work done by the team at one time. Ideally, the WIP of the team must be the least work they can handle while they are busy, as further additions can slow down the team by forcing them out of iteration delivery rates.

Now the question here is why it’s important?

The leaders’ moral duty is to say straight “no” to the new workload until the team delivers its current running iteration. So it simply shows that whenever your team is thriving and landing a hands-on new job rather than finishing what they have, it shows the team is currently under-high WIP.

Parallel Activities

Leaders should keep an eye on backlog items and the number of new initiatives. This metric is more about “working on the future rather than fixing the past.” However, the leaders remain busy developing the organization capability, nurturing talents and innovation. In addition, they must work with teams contributing team’s priorities to help them stay productive. So, it makes the organization move at a high pace.

The formula and the motto we can say is simple “Leave the Past to Make the Future.” Measure the things which are yet to be performed, rather than sticking to the future.

Return value

Do you offer easy wins and capitalize on massive bets? Leaders who collaborate with teams on the backlog for value delivery aim to demonstrate positive gains in this measure because they recognize that their primary obligation is to regularly, effectively, and profitably develop the customer experience. A good lead indicator for the Net Promoter Score is a favourable trend over time. The return of value is quantified on a team basis.

Release Frequency

An Agile team frequently releases its product into the hands of users for feedback, whether critical or appreciative. Frequent releases help minimize the risks of doing unwanted things and doing them wrongly. The leader influences necessary changes to enable teams to do it, resulting in reduced time to market. The leaders work with teams to help understand what is worth and the least suitable items to deliver by looking at market conditions and the business environment. However, the main driver normally drives back to characterizing a releasable lump of work necessary to the client. It requires leaders to characterize the deliveries. They break down cycles, client needs, user experiences, and innovation to cut backlog items into little, free additions of significant worth.

Carry Over

This measurement can focus light on many teams difficulties. Reliable carryover focuses on backlog items that are too enormous going into the development. In any case, it implies that the narratives were not investigated and appropriately cut before they entered for development. It eases back conveyance drastically as teams sit around idly dissecting, cutting, and reprioritizing during the development. More modest lumps of work improve the agile teams’ capacity to appraise precisely and convey an incentive without carrying over.

In a nutshell, tracking plays a huge role in tracking business performance. Metrics help in detoxifying the loopholes, so have valuable metrics. They not only proactively resolve issues before they damage or hamper growth.

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Naveen Kumar Singh
Agilemania

Agile Coach and Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) @Agilemania, Servant leader @Agile 30 and Developer @GitHub, Ranting @LinkedIn & an Artist @YouTube