Measuring Team Success with Scrum Metrics and KPIs
Measuring or evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your team impacts your organization’s growth. Your product has to pass through multiple stages during its development phase to deliver something of quality. Without an agile management method, which lets you easily monitor your team’s progress from the initial phase to completion, it can be a tedious process.
There are three main types of agile management frameworks: scrum, kanban, and lean. The scrum framework is commonly used for software development. With the help of scrum metrics and KPIs, you can measure your team’s success, performance, and productivity. In this blog post, I’m going to discuss:
1. What scrum is.
2. Three significant scrum roles.
3. Four important scrum actions.
4. Five valuable Scrum KPIs and metrics.
5. Bold BI’s agile dashboards for measuring team success.
6. Suggestions for motivating your team.
Before diving in, let me explain a few terms key to understanding the scrum framework:
Terms
sprint: a specific work period of 2–4 weeks to complete planned tasks with team members. Each sprint starts after a sprint planning meeting.
product backlog: a list of tasks planned by the product owner, prioritized, and intended for the sprint.
sprint backlog: a list of tasks picked from the product backlog and considered by the scrum team during the sprint planning meeting.
release backlog: a set of tasks pulled from the product backlog and prioritized and planned for the release. Each sprint covers these tasks. After five or six sprints, completed tasks are utilized for the product release.
story point: an estimation of the number of hours required to work on tasks. Each point denotes four hours. Example: 1 denotes four hours, 2 denotes eight hours, and so on. Task assignments to team members are based on estimated story points.
What Is Scrum?
Scrum is a lightweight, simple framework that works effectively in complex environments. By dividing large products into small pieces of work, a team can complete the product quickly and effectively with transparent work tracing and product quality measurements. Many organizations often use scrum KPIs to know their team’s progress and calculate work quality, product progress, and team members’ contributions to the sprint.
Scrum works on short sprint cycles of 2–4 weeks and a release cycle will be followed by 6–10 sprint ends to maintain a stable product. When a sprint starts, the scrum master fixes the time frame, defines the tasks that need to be done, and assigns the tasks to team members. There are three significant roles for managing a scrum to deliver a quality product.
Three Significant Scrum Roles
The three pillars of scrum are the product owner, the scrum master, and the team members. These three are the scrum team. Here I’ll discuss their roles and their importance in a scrum.
1. Product owner
The master behind the product, they create the product backlog and decide what tasks need to be done in every sprint cycle, prioritizing them according to customer need.
2. Scrum master
The one who directs the team members and helps them complete tasks efficiently in a given timeframe, they address the impediments faced by the team, and they offer guidance to produce a high-quality product, ensuring the team achieves the goal of the sprint.
3. Team members
Individuals who play key roles in executing tasks planned for the sprint, they are self-organized, adaptive learners who have a clear picture of their goal as planned by the scrum master.
Four Important Scrum Actions
There are four important scrum actions necessary to successfully complete work planned for the sprint. By following these steps, an organization can maximize time usage, transparency within the team, awareness of the sprint’s shortcomings, and measures that need to be taken in the next sprint to improve productivity.
1. Sprint planning
With input from the product owner regarding customer feedback from previous releases, the scrum master conducts a sprint planning meeting with the product owner and the team members. Considering a subset of tasks from the release backlog, work is chosen for the product backlog and moved into the sprint backlog. Per the product manager’s task priority schedule, the scrum master plans the sprint and discusses the sprint goal with the team. The main objective of the sprint is needed to clarify the individual work that needs to be done by the team members.
2. Scrum meeting
The scrum meeting is conducted by the scrum master for a maximum of 15 minutes every day. With the help of the scrum meeting, team members can set the day’s target and can discuss any impediments faced in the task. The scrum master can monitor the progress and provide suggestions for achieving the sprint goal. Every member can discuss their work from the previous day, their plan for that day’s work, and any knowledge-sharing required for the current sprint cycle.
3. Sprint review
The sprint review meeting is conducted at the end of every sprint cycle. In the meeting, team members show a demo of new features, or work completed during the sprint, and report on pending items, explaining the reason for delay. The scrum team can discuss the plan for the pending items for the next sprint cycle.
4. Sprint retrospective
In simple words, the sprint retrospective is nothing but a feedback session where the scrum master discusses the completed work, ways to improve the work, and what can be done in the next sprint to complete the work on time. Valuable insights to improve the performance of the sprint are discussed, and new ideas and practices are welcomed in the meeting.
Five Valuable Scrum KPIs and Metrics
A key performance indicator (KPI) is used to measure the performance of the key objectives of the business. Scrum metrics and KPIs help the organization consistently keep track of goals in every release. Using scrum metrics and KPIs, you can identify success and failure models and frequently motivate the team to increase work quality and grow the organization. Here are some valuable scrum KPIs for measuring your team’s performance and success.
1. Planned vs committed tasks
Planning tasks and committing tasks are two different things that in concert show the efficiency of a team. Uncommitted tasks will be carried over as a backlog to another sprint. If a team completes all the planned tasks, then the team members will be more confident. This measure, a ratio of completed tasks to planned tasks, helps to set goals for the release plan and move uncommitted tasks to the next sprint.
2. Communication between team members
Communication between team members is a key tool that does wonders in the team. Proper communication between the product manager, the scrum master, and the team members will clarify all doubts about the task. The team will work effectively, and the process will be refined and flexible. Lack of communication will result in low-quality products, and this will affect the team’s performance.
3. Understanding the sprint goal
Successfully meeting the goal is determined by the team’s understand of the objectives of the product. Without properly understanding the requirements, no matter how easy the tasks are, the team will fail to reach its goal for completing release backlog items, which is the product backlog planned for the particular release. Recognizing that the sprint goal is to complete product backlog items for the release plan gives the team confidence that work is going the right way, and it helps them understand the product technically.
4. Burndown charts
Burndown charts show the difference between assigned story points and remaining story points in a sprint, which represent the progress of your team’s work. Using a burndown chart, you can continuously monitor sprint progress clearly with daily records that identify team members’ story point completion.
5. Team velocity
Team velocity is calculated by comparing story points completed in the current sprint with several past sprints. By comparing the sprint velocity to previous sprints, you can determine the capacity of the team. And by setting story points according to the team’s capacity, you enable them to complete all the planned points. This helps you identify your team’s productivity when planning future sprints.
Bold BI’s Agile Dashboards for Measuring Your Team’s Success
With Bold BI’s agile solution dashboards, you can monitor sprint progress, prioritize tasks according to need, review your team’s performance, assess customers’ needs, manage defects, and determine team velocity. Syncfusion provides five agile dashboard examples to help you measure scrum KPIs and metrics at different levels.
1. Sprint management dashboard
The sprint management dashboard helps you track sprint progress, team performance, and task status.
In the depicted dashboard, the pie chart widget shows tasks by status, including in-progress, validated, open, code review, on-hold, and closed tasks in the sprint. You can also track other metrics such as sprint velocity, scope changes, incomplete tasks, completed story points, and more.
2. Release management dashboard
The release management dashboard helps you analyze the release metrics of a product and monitor team tasks.
In the depicted dashboard, the column chart helps you monitor planned tasks vs completed tasks based on priority. You can also track other metrics such as product release details with a project’s start and release date, total worked hours, completed sprint tasks, story points, and more.
3. Customer satisfaction dashboard
The customer satisfaction dashboard helps track customer satisfaction about the product.
In this dashboard, the Net Promoter Score (NPS), shown in the radial gauge, identifies how likely customers are to recommend the product to others. You can also track other customer satisfaction metrics such as CES, CSAT, response time, and more to measure customer feedback and satisfaction.
4. Defect management dashboard
The defect management dashboard helps to find defects in the product and improvement actions to resolve bugs.
In the depicted dashboard, the bar chart shows the defects count by reporters, and the card widget shows escaped defects from the release. You can also track metrics such as defects by type, status, and reporter to fix bugs on time and improve product quality.
5. Team management dashboard
The team management dashboard helps you track employee work performance data.
In the depicted dashboard, the radial gauge and bar chart widgets show the total number of hours worked by the whole team and by individual team members. You can also track other metrics such as bug status based on priority, task summaries, team roles, task completion, task status, and more.
These five agile dashboard examples show how you can measure your team’s success and monitor work activities to deliver the best product. Here are few suggestions to encourage your team to succeed.
Quick suggestions to motivate your team for success
- Openly appreciating your team’s work has a big impact and motivates them personally.
- Communicating with your team helps identify the struggles they face and improves your connectivity with the team.
- Being transparent and setting clear goals encourages maximum output from the team.
- Every team member has strengths and weaknesses. Assigning tasks according to their strengths will boost the productivity of the team. Also, help them overcome weaknesses by providing knowledge-sharing sessions and monitoring their improvement only after a considerable amount of time, giving them space to learn.
- Encouraging your team’s innovative, progressive ideas will eventually increase the growth of your organization.
- Giving your team freedom and a considerable timeline encourages them to find solutions to difficult issues on their own. Rushing them to complete a task creates a pressurized feeling, preventing them from finding solutions themselves.
- Expressing gratitude directly to team members will make them happy and motivate them to work more flexibly.
- Sharing negative feedback politely motivates your team to not repeat the same mistakes.
Conclusion
I hope this blog post gave you a better understanding about scrum metrics and KPIs, and how to measure team success to increase efficiency, productivity, and growth. You can also look at the various solution dashboards available in Bold BI. If you have any questions on this blog, please feel free to post them in the following comment section. To get started with Bold BI, please request a free 30-minute demo with our experts to discuss creating dashboards and any other features you would like to learn more about. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on July 14, 2020.
