Agile Metrics: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Recently, I worked with some teams and I was checking out their agile metrics. Since they were doing time-boxed Waterfall (ugh), the metrics were pretty bad. But the metrics they shared and were viewed by others were seen as good. So I wanted to make sure that I had a chance to address that here.

I just held a LinkedIn Live event about good, bad, and ugly metrics. The main challenge I still see is managers who don’t know how to manage wanting to see individual performance (“to identify high-performers”, but everyone knows it’s to let go of “low-performers”). But these kinds of challenges present opportunities to have conversations to change behaviors and, eventually, mindsets. The link to a video of that live event is now on my YouTube channel.

Good Agile Metrics

Good metrics are those that are team-based, trend data, and actionable. In other words, we can look at how a team is doing over time and identify improvements we want to make or experiments we want to run to find new, better ways of delivering value to the business and our customers. Good metrics help us make ourselves better.

Bad Agile Metrics

Bad metrics are sometimes the most common metrics – especially burn-down charts. I find burn-downs pretty useless in the main, especially since there are so many other metrics that provide better information. Sometimes bad metrics are vanity metrics – numbers or charts that make us feel good about ourselves but don’t provide anything beyond that. The candy of metrics, if you will.

And Ugly Agile Metrics

Ugly metrics, on the other other hand, are the worst. Like metrics that look at individual performance or compare teams. They not only fail to empower teams to make improvements, they oftentimes destroy team cohesion and reinforce organizational anti-patterns. And worst, they can be used to punish teams and individuals. Ugly agile metrics are the lowest of the low.

So which metrics are your teams using? Which metrics do you want to explore using? Let me know in the comments!