You get what you measure...

Yesterday I was driving to meet a partner coach for coffee (yes I left my house...) and I heard a story on the radio that got me thinking about agile team metrics and how we use them.  To be fair, the story had nothing to do with agile, teamwork, business, customer value or anything like that.  It was about a study that highlighted a particularly unfavorable metric regarding police stops in a certain city. 

 Here's where my mind went - 

"What will happen next is someone high up at the police department will inevitably not like
these optics that these metrics show.  They are going to hate it so much they will convene a committee that will put new procedures in place for their rank and file officers.  The procedures will be a quota or something to that nature that will ensure the next time the metrics are reviewed, the ratios will look MUCH more favorable.  So favorable in fact, that people will eventually stop looking at that metric, all while never even getting close to the reason the officers were searching the cars in the first place."

Then my mind turned to our agile teams and I started thinking about our efficient metrics - velocity, predictability, cycle time, lead and lag time - those kinds of metrics.  You know - the tools that teams use to indicate the way that they are working can be improved.  The tools that can give hints as to what can be done to make improvements.  What happens to agile teams when they become focused on those metrics instead of what their customer finds valuable?

Yep - that's how my mind works! 

Let me explain.

Focusing on a particular team metric range only proves that the team can achieve that metric. I can tell you that an unscrupulous Scrum Master may or may not be very skilled at gaming things to achieve a particular metric.  If I were said unscrupulous scrum master... and I know that my boss' boss' boss is looking for my team to have a predictability metric in the range of 90-110%... I will make sure that my team is managing what they pull into their sprint plan AND the work that they actually complete show that we fall into that range.  It's not hard to do - in fact, it’s not even particularly hard to accidentally do!  If you are nerdy like me, you will recognize hints of the Hawthorne Effect in what I'm saying - People who know they are being observed will adjust their behavior into what they believe the observer expects to see.  If we know that management expects to see steady predictability - what will we get?  Steady predictability!  I'm not saying that's bad - I'm just saying it is...

Back to our agile teams- what is it that we want out of them?  Do we want them laser focused on their predictability?  I hope not!  I hope we want them laser focused on our customer and what our customer needs.  What our customer finds valuable.  I hope our agile teams use metrics as indicators on how to improve and become more efficient while being laser focused on our customer.  I hope that our managers and leaders want our teams to use their metrics to continually challenge themselves to become more effective, efficient and engaged.  I hope that when our leaders do focus on metrics, they are looking at the metrics that tell us that our customers are delighted in what we've delivered, that they are finding what we created to be useful and valuable.  Those are the metrics that really matter to teams.  The rest are just indicators.  

 

I'll wrap this though with a quote from one of our very own Scrum Masters - I think it sums up what I've been trying to say quite nicely -

"Metrics with the absence of the agile values/principles behind them become misguided and only marginally helpful."

So what do you think?  What are some examples of metrics that your team focuses on to know that you are delivering the value your customer wants?  How do you keep those metrics front and center?  I'd love to hear!

We all win together.