Determining Agile Metrics

October 31, 2019

On the path towards agility and all the processes required for digital transformation, many companies need to adopt the values and principles of Agile and set agile metrics to understand how to improve everything.

Agile metrics will help to obtain a certain amount of autonomy to create real business value and fun along the way as well!

The first step is to know what are the 12 rules for metrics that helps a company to understand how agile they are:

12 rules for metrics

We can define various metric systems to understand the standard of Agile we are maintaining

 

Metrics around Logic Model

 

  • Input: What do we use to do the work? Inputs of the development process, like people, tools, technology, number of user stories and number of requirements.  
  • Output: What are we producing or delivering? Outputs of the development process, like throughput, coverage test and bug ratio.
  • Outcomes: What do we wish to achieve? Short-term business impact, focus on customers, value, time-to-market, quality, reducing waste, ability to innovate.
  • Impact: What are the business goals? Goals and objectives like market share, new products and services and new business channels.
Business goals around logic model

Metrics around Business Model 

 

  • Customer 
  • Product 
  • People 

 

Customer

 

A company which is not customer centric, fails to understand their needs, and how to improve each interaction.

They should define their agile metrics around below points and change their scope according to the metric results:

  • Experiment validation (UX)
  • Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
  • Number of downloads and uninstalls of an app 
  • Usage Index 
  • Profile of customer
  • Customer retention
  • Churn rate 
  • Customer referral
  • New Customer per day, month or year

 

Product

 

Our clients’ need to focus on product management and have indicators that show the outcomes in an appropriate way to improve and visualize new challenges

 

  • Revenue by hours, day, week and month
  • Revenue by market or country
  • Conversion rate
  • Market share
  • Incident Impact 
  • Rate of Effectivity 
  • Quality 
  • Operational Cost 
  • OKR (Objective Key Result)

Lets look at some example:

 

Let’s look into a couple of OKR to understand how the business objectives can be used

  1. Objective: Increase recurring revenues

Key Result: 

  • Reach monthly recurring revenue ($ MRR) of $250k 
  • Increase the share of monthly subscriptions vs one-time contracts sold to 85%
  • Grow average subscription size to atleast $295 per month
  • Raise % annual renewals to 75%
  • Reduce churn % to < 1% monthly

2. Objective: Successfully launch version 3 of our main product

Key Result 

  • Get 10000 new signups
  • Get published product reviews in over 15 publications
  • Achieve sign-up to trial ratio of over 25 
  • Achieve trial to paid ratio of over 50 

 

People

 

We have to find a way to have a deep understanding about the people and their interactions. Here are some great examples of how you can develop an environment of trust and self-organization:

  • eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) 
  • Team Competency matrix 
  • Career Path
  • Team Barometer
  • Happiness Index 
  • Niko-Niko
niko niko visual
Niko Niko
employee net promoter score chart
Employee Net Promoter Score

How can we use this information to improve and level up the maturity of our team ?

 

  • We recommended in the beginning to use a shortlist of indicators.
  • Always involve the whole team and share the information with them at the end of the sprint.

This helps towards increasing the transparency of the project across clients, stakeholders, team members. With the customer advice focused on the outcome, a culture of learning will thrive and have the opportunity to improve the success rate of your project. We have written a number of article on agile to discuss every aspect of the methodology.

Dos and Don’ts

 

Don’t implement micromanagement disciplines, it exhausts yourself and the team, that leads to lose focus.

Try to create a journey, learn fast and build an experiment to change the behavior of the customer in your favor, and it will help the business to identify the right path. Visit our Agile Studio to know more

The important takeaway here is to improve everything where there is a possibility and understand what the current situation is. Think about how taking into account the advice given you will have the power to change the game.

Bibliography:

 

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In the fast-changing business environment, it is critical for organizations to be able to adapt, develop resilience and rapidly discover new possibilities during times of uncertainty. The Agile Organizations studio enables organizations to evolve sustainably and progressively to remain relevant in a game that never ends with ever-evolving rules.