Agile Teams Performance Measurement – How to measure and benchmark team value creation
By Harold Van Heeringen
Managing the IT function in management and development is more important than ever. It is wrongly assumed that agile, DevOps or multidisciplinary teams do not need planning or leadership. It is also wrong to assume that their performance cannot be measured or that this is at the expense of agility or execution power.
The opposite is true: in practice, many projects and programs are almost ‘blind’. This is at a time when their size is increasing and the complexity is humanly incalculable. On a daily basis, management faces the hefty bill of uncontrollable journeys “beyond the point of no return”.
Active attention and direction is a precondition for success. However, professional commissioning and facilitating leadership should not be confused with oppressive micro-management. A strategic vision, a lived-in architecture with underlying principles is essential. So are: clear technology choices, prioritization and solution-oriented approaches to practical challenges.
In addition, objectively substantiated insights are necessary. This highlights the value delivered by development teams and how that translates into size and quality. Not least for the teams, in fact.
There is a way to provide and unlock this for anyone who wants to take responsibility. This is regardless of whether this is someone with a technical or non-technical profile. Data – directly extracted from the software code or management systems around it – plays a key role. To look back and learn or look ahead and actually live up to ambitions or forecasts: the Plan Do Check Act cycle is complete again.
In this presentation, I’ll show the way the performance of agile teams can be measured in an objective, repeatable and verifiable way. This way, team performance metrics: Productivity, Cost Efficiency, Delivery Speed, Sprint Quality and Product quality can be measured, compared and benchmarked against industry data. I’ll show a recent study of 4 teams of one organization, with each team in another European country.
The performance measurement also is used to recalibrate long-term effort and cost estimates based on actual productivity delivered. It will show the way senior management can again understand the progress of certain initiatives. It enables them to show active attention and direction,. This results in more value creation for the given budget and better organizational results.
About Harold Van Heeringen
Harold van Heeringen worked for 17 years as a senior consultant software metrics/cost estimation consultant. He is now a principal consultant and practice lead for IT Intelligence services (including Estimation & Performance Measurement). Harold is a director on the ISBSG board and a board member of Nesma. He regularly publishes white papers, blogs and articles on software metrics and performance measurement.
