Lagging Behind? Metrics and Reporting Matter

Lagging Behind? Metrics and Reporting Matter Ask any team what metrics they track, and you’ll get some version of the same list… Velocity. Story points completed. Burndown. Sprint goal hit rate. Maybe defect counts if someone’s been paying attention. These numbers feel solid. They’re concrete, they’re consistent, and they show up reliably at the end of every sprint. I get why teams hold onto them. There’s comfort in a number that doesn’t require interpretation — it either went up or it didn’t. The problem isn’t that these metrics are wrong. The problem is what happens when a team tries to improve them. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] ⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠ https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] ⁠https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/⁠ https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] ⁠https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/⁠ https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Ask any team what metrics they track and you'll get some version of the same list. Velocity, story points completed, burn down, sprint goal hit rate, maybe defect count if someone's paying attention to that. But these numbers all feel solid. They're concrete, they're consistent, and they show up reliably at the end of every sprint. I get why teams still hold on to those. I get it. There's comfort in a number that doesn't require any interpretation. It either went up, or it stayed the same, or it went down.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  The problem isn't that these metrics are wrong. The problem is what happens when a team tries to improve them. Early in my career, I was on a team that had a velocity problem. Not a fake one, I'm talking a real velocity problem. We were consistently finishing less than we planned, sprint after sprint, committing to too much. Leadership wanted it fixed, so we did what felt logical. We talked about it in retrospectives, we adjusted our estimates, we tried to be more careful about what we committed to. Velocity went up for about two sprints, then it drifted back down. Then someone suggested, we just estimate a little higher, and somehow that became the quiet, unspoken strategy. Nobody said it out loud, but everyone understood what was happening. The number improved dramatically, but the team didn't. The team was stuck.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  That's the thing about lagging indicators, and velocity is a textbook indicator. They tell you the outcome of something that already happened. The sprint is done, the points are counted, the chart is updated. You're looking at the exhaust and not the actual engine. And here's what makes it tricky. You can move, you can move a lagging indicator. It's just that the easiest way to improve or to move it have nothing to do with actually working better. You can inflate estimates, you can narrow scope quietly, you can redefine what done means and that you're technically defensible. None of that improves the team, it just improves the report. I've seen this play out in different ways across different teams, but the pattern is almost always the same.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  The metric becomes the goal, and once the metric becomes the goal, you've lost the plot entirely. This isn't a failure of discipline or intention, it's a predictable response to the wrong kind of pressure. When a number is being watched, really watched, by people with opinions about it, the human instinct is to protect it. Teams aren't gaming the system because they're lazy or dishonest, they're doing it because they've been put in a position where the number matters more than the reality behind it. That's a system problem, not a people problem. The harder question, the one I started asking myself after that experience was, if we can improve velocity by focusing on velocity, what should we be focusing on instead? And it turns out there's a whole category of metrics that live upstream of the outcomes

• 3:01Speaker 00

  that we care about. They are messier, more subjective, harder to put on a dashboard, but they're the ones that actually give you something to pull strings on. But before we go there, I want you to think of this. If your team's main response to a struggling metric is to adjust the metric, that's data too. It's telling you that the measurement has become the objective, and that's usually a sign that the team needs a different conversation, not a better spreadsheet. So, something food for thought. Pick one metric your team reports were unregularly and ask yourself, when was the last time that number actually changed how the team worked? Not how they reported, but how they actually worked. If you're struggling to answer that question, it might be worth asking what that metric is actually used for.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  For me, the hardest part is teaching teams that they need to focus on outcomes and not output. Measuring impact, happy customers, social media sentiment, value, the things that many teams don't take the time to measure well because it doesn't matter to them at the end of the day. When they get their performance evaluation, they're not evaluated on satisfaction of the customer. Typically, they're evaluated on the quantity of work they developed. And that's the sticky part. We need to get past the whole conversation about quantity and quantitative data analysis and start talking about qualitative data analysis and rework. Was the work that we performed actually good? Did it provide a value to the customer? Did they feel like they got a good return on investment? And are they happy about the impact that work had on them and the greater good? That's going to do it for this one.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  I hope you enjoyed it. If you have a topic you want us to discuss, learnmoretoangeldad.com. We'd love to hear from you. And as always, we encourage you to stay healthy, stay well, and stay agile, my friends. Until next time, do take care. Bye now.