Improve How Your Scrum Team Uses Metrics
By: Zombie Scrum Resistance
Tags: Zombie Scrum, Workshop, Scrum, Facilitation, Liberating Structures

Improve How Your Scrum Team Uses Metrics

4 Do-it-yourself workshops to improve how your team uses metrics and how to measure the things that really matter! Zombie Scrum Resistance Follow Apr 12 · 7 min read

Every Scrum Team understands the value of metrics, but so many of them also struggle to use them effectively. This ties into our own experience with Scrum Teams as well. When we started with Scrum, about 12 years ago, metrics were one of the first things we started experimenting with. How else could we determine if we were successful? So we decided to measure the number of story points we delivered per Sprint, tracked how many hours everyone was working on the items of the Sprint Backlog, and measured team happiness. In hindsight, none of these metrics made sense. Based on the metrics, we were doing great. But “in reality”, our product was full of bugs, stakeholders were unhappy, and team morale was low.

Measuring output can quickly result in Zombie Scrum, instead measure the outcome.

Over time, we learned to make a distinction between useless and useful metrics. In short, measuring the output is often useless and can lead to Zombie Scrum, measuring the outcome is useful and helps you do Professional Scrum. Also, don’t use happiness metrics, but measure team morale.

In the article “Stop Measuring The Pizzas And The Cooks” we describe why output-oriented metrics are mostly a waste of time in software- and product development. You can do really well on your output (many items delivered) and still go bankrupt (low sales, unhappy customers). You can run a profitable business (high margin of profit, many returning customers) even when your output is low (few items delivered, small team). Makes sense, right?

This sounds nice, right? But what are examples of outcome-oriented metrics? How can you start with these metrics? Who should be involved? What else is useful to measure?

We decided to help you find an answer to these questions with our do-it-yourself workshops and experiments. Not only do these workshops give you specific suggestions, they also include a step-by-step approach to use them and help you move in the right direction. The four workshops are:

In this blog post, we offer you a short description of these workshops. We hope it inspires you to give them a try. Once you’ve used them, let us know the results, let’s learn and grow, together!

Note that we ask for a small donation in return for each workshop (5 USD). You can also support us on Patreon to download our digital content for free (note that this benefit starts from the “Contributor”-tier and onward).

Workshop #1: Identify The Metrics That Are Most Relevant To Your Success

The Scrum framework offers teams a great way to learn. Every iteration brings the potential for new ideas and improvements. This is what transparency, inspection, and adaptation are all about. At the same time, the quality of your improvements depends on what you make transparent. We’ve been with many teams that focus exclusively on small optimizations but don’t see the bigger picture (low-quality product, unhappy customers, low morale). We’ve also been with teams that were convinced they were already at the top of their game until we identified good metrics. There is always room to improve — but you need to discover where first.

The purpose of this do-it-yourself workshop is to select a minimal set of good metrics for your team, and to stay away from “vanity metrics”. The illustration below shows the four areas in which we would expect outcomes. Increased responsiveness to changing needs, more valuable outcomes, and improved quality. Overall, we would also expect improvements in each of these areas over time as people learn how to collaborate more effectively as they iterate together.

This workshop contains the Liberating Structures TRIZ, Shift & Share, and 15% Solutions.