Measuring Progress

“The problem….is metrics. It is a situation where if you can’t count what is important, you make what you can count important.”

— James Willbanks (Army advisor)

There’s a challenge that we see consistently with our clients who struggle with determining how well their ART is performing using concrete measurements. This gets in the way of the vital Inspect and Adapt cycle that holds such an important place in the Agile methodology. After all, if there’s no established definition of success or consistent means of measuring performance against that goal, how will you know what needs to be improved? And, if you can’t prove your first ART is succeeding, how will you get approved to launch another ART?

To address this issue, many organizations make the mistake of tracking vanity metrics.

These are simple measurements that look good on paper but that don’t really say much about the success of the...