Understanding The Problem You’re Trying to Solve With Metrics

Metrics are important. Tracking work is important.  “What gets measured gets done.” But, if you don’t understand why you’re measuring things, or what the problem you’re trying to solve when you begin measuring things—no amount of metrics is going to help. 

In this episode of SoundNotes, LeadingAgile Senior Consultant, Jessica Wolfe and Dave Prior talk about metrics and how important it is to understand what problem you’re trying to solve when you begin using metrics to understand performance and improvement.  This interview is a follow up to a presentation Jessica gave recently at Agile Tampa called “Achieving Success with any Agile Planning Tool”.

During the podcast, Jessica and Dave discuss some of the more common things organizations initially track when they’re moving away from a traditional approach, what to be careful about when you begin using these metrics, how the metrics that you’re focused on will evolve over time as you mature in your adoption of Agile, and what to do if you find yourself tracking information and you aren’t sure why.

Additional Information

During the podcast, Jessica and Dave make a reference to how we design the tool to help the end users understand the new way of working in the LeadingAgile model, so we wanted to provide a couple of screenshots to assist you in seeing some of the possibilities. Here’s an example of what the tool might look like at the Portfolio Tier on an Epic.

Contacting Jessica

If you’d like to contact Jessica you can reach her at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/jessica-wolfe/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejessicawolfe/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/thejessicawolfe
• Email: jessica.wolfe@leadingagile.com

Contacting Dave

If you’d like to contact Dave you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrsungo
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrsungo
• Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com

Send Us Your Questions

If you have a question you’d like to submit for an upcoming podcast, please send them to dave.prior@leadingagile.com

Upcoming Classes

And if you are interested in taking one of our upcoming Certified Scrum Master or Certified Scrum Product Owner classes, you can find all the details at https://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/