What do you do if your Agile project's success metrics are unclear?

If you're dealing with unclear success metrics in your Agile project, gather your team for a planning session. Ask everyone to share their views on what success for the project looks like, aiming for clear, practical goals that align with what you're trying to achieve as a team and company. Through open discussion, you'll come up with a clear set of success measures everyone agrees on and understands. This way, everyone knows what you're working towards and feels involved in reaching those goals.

At this juncture, it's crucial to recognize that metrics should not become the sole focus. As Deming famously cautioned, “People with targets and jobs dependent upon meeting them will probably meet the targets – even if they have to destroy the enterprise to do it.” When establishing relevant metrics, it's advisable to dissociate them from individual evaluations. Metrics should seamlessly integrate into the team's workflow without necessitating interruptions or additional tasks to obtain them. Metrics should be conscientiously chosen, with their management integrated into the daily activities of the development effort or project across all levels. They shouldn't be relegated to specific times like Wednesday nights or Sunday afternoons.

Begin by assembling your Agile team and engage in a comprehensive conversation about the goals of the project. Utilize this moment to define the vision of success for your undertaking by establishing specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-sensitive (SMART) metrics. This cooperative method guarantees that every member is in agreement and understands the benchmarks that will gauge the project's triumph. It is vital to confirm that these metrics are in harmony with the broad business objectives and deliver worth to your stakeholders.

Engaging stakeholders is a crucial part of any project or initiative. Perform Gemba walks by visiting your business location. Showing highest possible empathy towards the issues and challenges they face. Understand their vision and mission, create that sense of shared understanding and ownership. This helps to ensure their support for the project/product delivery, and can also provide valuable insights that contribute to its success.

Reviewing progress is an essential step in ensuring a project or task is on track to meet its objectives. This can involve checking key performance indicators (KPIs), milestones, and other metrics to assess whether the project is moving forward as planned. It's also important to regularly evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies and tactics being used, and adjust them as necessary based on the data and feedback collected. This process of continuous monitoring and adjustment helps to keep the project on course, maximizes efficiency, and improves the likelihood of achieving the desired outcomes.

As mentioned in book 'Drive' by Daniel Pink, the motivation for an individual can't be achieved through punishment or rewards in form of money, but more in terms of autonomy. This is true with a Team as well. In my experience, the more autonomous team is, the more creative they will be. The sense of Team's purpose combined with mastery on the skills required for Product building will make them more empowered and hence they become self-driven. An empowered team can work collaboratively with Management to identify the relevant metrics which will reflect the team's purpose and their performance against it.

It is important to scope the metrics so they appropriately evaluate the desired outcome. Make sure the project/product is in line with the business vision/strategy. What are you looking to improve? Is there a baseline metric on the area you are looking to improve? A simple success metric would be to make a measurable (you will need to clearly define measurable) over the baseline metric.

When Agile project success metrics are unclear, take these steps: 1) Define measurable metrics aligned with objectives, involving stakeholders 2) Regularly review progress against metrics in ceremonies like sprint reviews 3) Iterate and adjust metrics as needed 4) Empower teams to understand and own the metrics 5) Maintain clear communication about metrics and progress 6) Celebrate successes when milestones are achieved. By defining, monitoring, and aligning on success metrics, you increase chances of delivering successful outcomes that meet expectations in an Agile environment.

It’s very simple- build the system from the day one to support your Agile matrices very strong… After system has been built it’s going to be very tricky to track and measure some specific metrics as its difficult to gather data.

Coaching the team and leadership to align on outcomes before start implementing solutions is a key step in any outcome based Agile transformation. Once we aling on outcomes, the next thing is how do we know we have achieved those outcomes.And that's where the measures of success are vital. In my opinion, start experimenting with one or two measurable metrics to start with and scale as we learn more.