Agile camp 2018 - Team Metrics

1. Team Metrics
We are what we measure
Paul Jacinto

5. “It's easy to lie with statistics. But it
is easier to lie without them.”
- Frederick Mosteller

6. What’s the point ?
 Identify problems quickly
 Make informed forecasts and estimates
 High-performing or Low-performing team ?
 How do you know ?
 Is it a hunch ?
Your metrics can drive corrective behaviors !

7. “Essentially, all models are wrong, but
some are useful.”
- George E. P. Box

8. Hurricane Irene
(2011)
 Category-3
Winds up to 120 mph
 Costliest Atlantic storm
of the decade
 $14.2B in damage
 August 27th – Jacksonville, FL

9. The updated model
has the eye of storm over
North Carolina on
August 27th

10. Goals for this session
 New Analogies to sell analytics to your teams
 Appreciation for data and feedback loops in your daily life
 Gain Intuition on:
 Leading vs Lagging indicators
 Qualitative vs Quantitative measures
 Forecasting

11. Data Sources
TFS
Jira
Pivotal Tracker
Excel
Others

12. How do you start ?
 Gathering and looking at Data will be more fruitful if you
understand:
What you need ?
How you'll use it ?
How will the answers modify the team’s behavior ?

13. Lagging Indicators
 Easy to measure, hard to influence & improve
 “Output” Oriented
 Uses:
 Confirm a pattern is occurring
 Report on what’s happened in the past
 Examples:
 Items delivered in a release
 Did you finish your commitments or not ?

14. Leading Indicators
 Hard to measure but easy to influence
 Uses:
 Make changes to your behavior/environment while there’s still
time
 Making Predictions
 Examples:
 Ready Backlog of 2-3 iterations
 Number of known blockers

16. “Data analysis is an aid to thinking and
not a replacement for it.”
- Richard Shillington

17. What is Qualitative Data ?
 Any data that
Gives insight to a problem based on opinions,
narrative data
Messy, subjective, and imprecise, captures
emotion
Answers “why”

18. What is Quantitative data ?
 Data that is numerical and can be measured in a
standard way
 Objective in Nature; Emotionless
 Answers the “what” & “how much”

20. “Facts do not cease to exist because
they are ignored.”
- Aldous Huxley

21. Demo Excel Sheet

23. Roadblocks and Challenges ?
Culture
Pushback ? Expect-it
Resources & Tooling

24. Takeaways
 A good metric is Actionable and tells a story
 Try to incorporate metrics in your daily feedback loop
 Collect Quantitative and Qualitative data
 Utilize Leading and Lagging metrics
Using metrics is about developing key insights for
speeding up and making better decisions