Is this THE most important metric for Scrum team success?

In the world of metrics, we can feel overwhelmed with what to measure! What also makes it hard is that it's not just picking out the metric but also getting the team on board to work in a way where we can actually capture the data. I mean, think about it, if the team doesn't move the cards in real time, then the data we capture isn't going to be useful.

Getting buy-in from developers can be tricky because understandably, they are focusing on their work. The question then becomes: how do we identify the metrics or the metric that counts the most? Something with lower overhead that is easy to use, yields great insights for the team to improve, and doesn't upset the developers!

Well, in one short sentence, it would be this: don't let your cards get old!

Many of us inherently know that cards getting old on the board is a bad idea. You may know it in the language of "User Stories should be sized to get to Done in a few days" or "Stop starting, start finishing"... just an overall message that we have ingrained in us in the Agile community - work on the board for too long isn't a good look.

So, start measuring it!

Yes, figure out how long stuff normally takes to get across the board from TO DO to DONE.

And then ask:

• When pieces of work take longer than usual, explore why.

• Are you starting too much work before other pieces of work are finished?

• Are there any ways to limit how much work you can bring in at any one time as a team?

• Are there people on the team who need support on a piece of work but aren't comfortable sharing that with you?

• Are there problems within your workflow that are outside of your control and aren't taken into account during Sprint Planning?

• Are there impediments (be it process, tooling, interactions, and more) that you're aware of but aren't creating time with the team to explore these issues?

We can learn so much about improving the delivery of work just by looking at how old our work gets on the board to allow us to do something about it!

There is much more to this topic and other complementary techniques that will help you reduce the number of old cards on your board.

We'll be running our second data skills for Scrum Masters workshop in April. It's a one-day workshop and limited to 15 seats.

Message me directly to learn more.

Thanks,

Jem