The hidden Scrum Metric(s)?

I know what you’re thinking, “Another post about metrics and Scrum, really?” And I agree with you if this were a post about lagging, leading, or vanity metrics. Quite frankly, there are a lot of great blogs about valid metrics that focus on items from the DORA report. Posts like “Hey team, are we moving in the right direction?” by Ilya Vishnevsky. If you haven’t read this post, I highly recommend it as Ilya goes into great detail as to which of these types of metrics are important and why.

So, then what am I writing about? That dear reader is a great question. For that, I’d like you to first think about Scrum teams. Those that you have interacted with that have struggled to complete even one user story in a Sprint. As well as all those teams that more often than not complete not just the Sprint goal, but the entire Sprint backlog. Keep in mind, this is not a simple binary comparison. Teams flow between these extremes.

I’ve had the good fortune to be working with all three types of teams, and those teams between the extremes. When I look back at all of these teams, they each had a common thread. This nothing to do with skill, tenure nor engineering practices.

Image by Steve DiMatteo from Pixabay

Each of these teams and more specifically team members had their own self-happiness score (aka Net Promoter Score). Net Promoter Score or NPS is for more than just customer satisfaction. Yes, we all know that happy team members create more consistent and higher quality products that they create. Then how do we explain teams that are not happy but consistently complete their Sprint forecast?

What I have seen when teams are in this mode are:

1. They are either not being challenged to think creatively about a solution,
2. They are bored with the product they are working,
3. They are working under undue pressure to meet a deadline or
4. They do not feel appreciated.

By no means is this an exhaustive list, but just a few examples of the scenarios I helped teams work through. These teams were disengaged, doing just enough to look busy. So, what did I do to help them through this, well, that is a post for another time.

There are those teams that also complete their Sprint forecast and are still experiencing low NPS scores for similar reasons to those above. In my experience, these are the teams that: 1) no longer use times like the Retrospective to learn about themselves and how to improve what they are doing, and/or 2) have rarely, if ever, modified how they estimate work, even though they may have done similar work dozens of times in the past (they know what they are doing, and what the challenges are).

Likewise, I have seen teams and team members who were completely satisfied, happy, and NOT completing much. Why is this? These teams and more importantly, these team members had some great challenges they were facing:

1. They were being asked to do something new and creative,
2. They were excited by the work they were doing,
3. They were encouraged to learn quickly (aka fail fast and often), and
4. They felt appreciated for the work they were doing.

What have I learned from these dichotomies is that no matter if teams and team members are completing their Sprint forecasts, NPS is vital to understanding the health of the team. This can be measured in various ways. This can be done via conversations in and out of Retrospectives, team observation, and even surveys to the team members. When team members are happy and valued, regardless of the amount of work they are completing, it will be of the highest quality and value.