Understanding Performance
Every team should have a clear understanding of its performance. Measuring and analysing performance data makes a key contribution towards the team inspecting and adapting its delivery priorities, ways of working, learning priorities and need for coaching.
In A Nutshell
Team Performance
Autonomous teams decide for themselves what to measure, how to analyse the data to create information, how that information should be presented and how the data should be used. Autonomy mitigates strongly against the concept of standard organisational measures. There are well-recognised measures of performance that are widely used by many agile teams. Organisations can take advantage of these common metrics by encouraging all teams to use a shared definition.
Agile leaders recognise that the performance of teams depends on too many contextual factors to support direct comparison of metric values across teams. If shared definitions of metrics are used, it may be possible for leaders to pay attention to trends in the data so that they can assess the impact of changes made across the organisation.
The set of metrics used is not static overtime. Metrics that are informative today may not provide information in the future. Teams should regularly review the usefulness of their metrics, ceasing the use of redundant metrics and adding new ones that illuminate the concerns of the team.
Product Performance
Products need to demonstrate the delivery of value for their customers. Each product should define a set of key metrics that it will use to evaluate its performance. Some of these may be standardised across the Product Portfolio. Others will be specific to the product.
Understanding the performance of each product relative to the rest of the portfolio allows us to assess the level of investment that we should make. Performance is only one aspect of the investment decision. We may choose to make speculative investments (experiments) based on only small amounts of information.
Mature products need to consistently perform well in delivering their services to customers. Quality of Service is a key factor in determining the continued investment in a product.
Organisational Performance
The organisation needs to evaluate its holistic performance. Factors that need to be considered will include financial performance (summed across the product portfolio) and cultural performance in terms of attracting and retaining effective, skilled colleagues. The importance of Organisational Performance is discussed in Sustaining The Organisation.
Specific Practices
Analyse and Use Measurement Data
Define Qualitative Assessments
Identify Measurement Needs
When we deliver features into a product and when we provide the services offered by that product we are making an explicit investment from our available budgets. We need to evaluate the value realised by the product, its features and services so that we can assess the return from our investments. We use the information provided by our evaluation to help guide large scale decisions on where future investments should be directed.
Teams use service measures to understand whether the service they are providing to the customers meets the levels of service they have committed to. With sufficient history of data, we can begin to look at trends to see how quality of service is changing over time. The levels of service and trend information help the team to focus their attention on the improvements they need to make. We prioritise changes that will have the biggest impact on our Quality of Service.
The team uses measures of delivery in order to understand its current rate of delivery. After data has been gathered for some time, trend analysis may reveal how rate of delivery is changing over time. The rate of delivery and its trend help the team to understand whether and where they need to focus their attention in order to meet their own and stakeholders expectations.
We measure stuff because we want to base our decisions on information. Consistent information can only be created from data that is itself coherent and consistent and that is analysed consistently too. To keep our data gathering, processing and analysis consistent, we ensure we have clear definitions of the data we want to use and how we will use it.
Related Practice Categories
Agile teams continuously seek to improve their working practice, improving quality of service and increasing rate of delivery. The most effective learning is local to the team. They inspect the work that has been done, looking for successes and for problems. They adapt to reinforce practice that leads to success and to remove practice the leads to problems.
The organisation must remain capable of delivering its goals and objectives. It must continue to deliver the features and services of its portfolio of products. The organisation must be resilient in the face of challenge and change so that it can continue to realise value by delivering to its customers.
“Let’s Experiment!” I heard one leader cry. “But Why?” retorts another.
Maybe we find ourselves trying to do more with less, trying to keep pace with a competitor or even keep one step ahead. In all these cases, we will need to adapt and try new things - experimenting can be a systematic way of testing our assumptions and documenting our findings.