Approaching metrics the right way can set you up for success for any value delivery.

Using the following approach, your metrics lineup will be tailor made to take advantage of all of the powerful insights of quality information.

🚨 First, take a holistic review of the teams who are tasked with your delivery. Understanding the teams, from a maturity, technical, and organizational perspective will give you a good position to start understanding what metrics will be beneficial to track. Focusing on stability and throughput metrics is a great place to start here.

🚨 Second, get an understanding of what are the demands from your leadership chain for reporting, and how your existing metrics fit into that scheme. An area that often gets overlooked is what do your senior leaders want to see in terms of reporting. Whether it’s usage statistics, cycle time, or deliverable schedules, understanding first what your leaders want to then understand their WHY will let you better influence this reporting list towards healthier metrics.

🚨 Next, establish your tiered metrics. Start with basic health metrics for your teams, velocity variance, cycle time, and backlog health. Then look at how you build program level metrics that build on what is being tracked from your teams. Metrics like epic cycle time and throughput can focus on delivery while customer facing metrics like engagement or satisfaction can tie in our customer-centric approach to value.

🚨 Finally, data in hand, you can refine and tweak your approach. One of the most critical areas for refining is what information your leaders are interested in. By focusing on value centric metrics gained at the program level and throughput metrics to understand impacts to the team, you can guide leaders away from vanity metrics and comparisons based on relative information (ie comparing team velocities).

This certainly isn’t a comprehensive guide, but is definitely a good starting place for improving your metrics approach!