How to measure the team performace: what metrics should I use?
Breed a culture of trust and responsibility instead of control and suspicion
Expose how the team feels in near real time. Team happiness is a leading indicator of performance. Identify what’s going on now and they’ll likely know what is going to happen soon.
With so many great metrics to choose from, a few obvious questions arise: How many should a team use? For how long should they use the ones selected? And who gets choose?
Teams might decide on one or two important metrics to add to their current dashboard. They can then add one or two more over time. On a well established team, three, five or perhaps up to seven maximum might be in use at any given time. Any more, and they’ll likely get into analysis paralysis.
The useful lifespan of a single metric could range from a couple of months to a couple of quarters. Probably never shorter than three iterations.
Coaches or managers should not mandate any specific metric, nor a minimum number of metrics. Metrics are for teams to learn and explore how they can improve themselves through inspect-and-adapt cycles. Teams should choose those metrics they think will be useful in that regard.
While some metrics can scale to teams of teams, i.e., the larger organization where all teams “own the metrics” for their parts of the company pie, neither teams nor managers should compare metrics across teams. Sure, use metric comparisons to start conversations, to share knowledge and insights gained across teams. But never: “My X-metric is better than yours …” -- never!
When selecting metrics, a team should be able to answer:
- Why “this metric?” – why does it matter?
- What insights might we gain from it?
- What is expected to change?
- How might it be gamed or misused?
- Is the metric measuring the team, and not individuals?
What are some for trade-offs / costs of improvement? Working to improve one thing may temporarily reduce another (e.g., predictability may increase at the expense of throughput).
- How often would we like to “take a data point?”
- How long will we run an experiment related to this metric? (What is the half-life?)
- How will we know when we’re “done” with this metric (it has served its purpose, and it’s time to retire it and consider another)?
- Is this metric a leading or lagging indicator?
- How will we make our measurements visible – to promote knowledge sharing, collaboration with other teams and trust with our sponsors?
Remember:
That which is measured will improve, at a cost. Which metrics are used should be arrived at by team consensus – not mandated by management. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Look for and understand trends, not hitting magic numbers. Correlation may not mean causation, but it sure is a hint.
Make your metrics visible.
Expose how the team feels in near real time. Team happiness is a leading indicator of performance. Identify what’s going on now and they’ll likely know what is going to happen soon.
Radiate the Information
Did you catch that I snuck visibility in there twice? Sharing your metrics with stakeholders can be a bit scary, especially if you’ve ever been in a place where metrics have been used as a weapon, but take a leap. Be brave. Show them to others.
Only with transparency can we collectively look through enough lenses to build an integrated and holistic view. And then we can collaborate on improving “all the things.”
A team should not be simply striving for ever increasing values, as sometimes slowing down might be called for. Instead, teams should look at variations in their metrics, and then dig to get to the root causes of that variability (or at least develop a few good hypotheses). By striving for consistency and stability (i.e., predictability) teams will find that increased performance - delivery of value - will come as a natural side effect.
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