Agile metrics

Implementing agile metrics allows you to make fact-based decisions to set a direction in your organisation, prioritise the right initiatives and continually improve your efforts by establishing the right agile measuring system where it brings most value in the organisation.

For companies, Agile has long been a successful way of handling the increasing speed of the world around us, making organisations able to respond swiftly to changing demands while positively impacting the bottom line, decreasing costs and decreasing time to market.

Many organisations have already implemented Agile to decrease time to market, but they also seek to improve productivity, product quality as well as customer and employee engagement. However, it is not yet clear to many of them how to continue making decisions that will maximise and to continue realising the benefits of an agile implementation.

This leads to the following question: How can you use agile metrics to maximise and to continue realising the benefits of your agile implementation?

Implementing agile metrics enables you to keep a realistic and data-based overview of progress, thus ensuring higher productivity, better quality and improved engagement.

What is agile metrics?

Agile metrics are the standards that you set and use to measure your team’s work. It is a paradigm shift towards establishing more transparency, creating insights and having the right conversations that support your continuous improvement efforts.

With agile metrics, you measure how much you impact the end user rather than measure the amount of work or the actual tasks performed. The metrics cover the actual performance of teams; however, they also dig deeper into the company environment, principles of management as well as individual motivation and work habits.

Establishing a new way of measuring with agile metrics

We know that new ways of working require new ways of measuring. Agile metrics help you move away from micromanagement and focusing just on completing tasks towards increased and meaningful productivity, higher value for customers and better team dynamics.

To support and utilise the full potential of your agile organisation, it is key to know both baseline and improvement potentials.

Establishing agile metrics in your organisation will enable you to build evidence for performance, efficiency and effectiveness.

As a result, you will move:

• From measuring progress to measuring time to market
• From manual reporting to real-time transparency
• From following up to building up

Independently of who is using the agile metrics, you must include tangibles as well as intangibles in your deliverables to implement and succeed with agile metrics. Tangibles can be a metric overview or a conceptual model, and intangibles can be behavioural changes or capability building.

Implementing agile metrics allows you to make fact-based decisions to set a direction in your organisation, prioritise the right initiatives and continually improve your efforts by establishing the right agile measuring system where it brings most value in the organisation.