How would you determine the success of agile within your organization?
How would you determine the success of agile within your organization?
Welcome to part 9 in our?scrum master interview questions?series where John McFadyen answers common questions asked of scrum masters in interviews and client engagements.
That’s an interesting question because there are several ways of?measuring success, yet I often come across measures that make no sense.
Measures that don’t make success
I’m not sure how these measures matter to an organization?
Agile, or an?agile framework?such as?scrum, has no intrinsic value. Scrum is a great framework but in and of itself, it doesn’t create or capture value. It is simply a tool, and like all tools, it is the application of the tool and the context within which it is applied, that truly matters.
Instead, we need to be thinking about why the?organization adopted agile?in the first place.
We need to think about the problems we are trying to solve and the business objectives we are trying to achieve.
What is important to the organization and has the introduction of agile or scrum helped them move the needle on the metrics that truly matter?
We can get caught up in measuring:
And so forth, but your focus, as a?scrum master, needs to be on metrics and leading indicators that demonstrate how organizational agility is helping to achieve customer or organizational objectives.
Customer Measures
Scrum?is built on the value proposition of delivering twice the work in half the time, but it doesn’t matter how much we are producing if the customer doesn’t want or need what we have built.
Is the?adoption of scrum?helping to move the needle on these metrics, and if it is, then you have a great?measure for success?in the organization.
Operational Measures
It has been said that scrum doesn’t solve problems, it reveals them.
The framework exposes our weaknesses and creates an empirical process loop of feedback that empowers us to solve complex problems quickly and effectively.
Often, teams recognise that the?traditional style of waterfall project management?creates more problems than it solves. The red tape, the delays, and the focus on efficiency rather than effectiveness is what creates the need for a new style of working.
领英推荐
Trending
If we find that the adoption of agile or scrum is demonstrating that our teams are more effective, and the organizational agility has resulted in significant improvements in operational efficiency and effectiveness, then those would be great measures of success for the organization.
Measuring what matters
The adoption of?scrum or any agile?framework should be treated just like any other experiment.
You have a hypothesis, and you design an experiment to prove or disprove that hypothesis. You also decide which?measures would be leading indicators of success?and which measures would indicate that you are not able to create or capture value and should abandon what you are doing.
If a?scrum team?are awesome at scrum yet fail to create or capture value for customers or the organization, there is no point in persisting with that approach.
If a?scrum team?are newbies at scrum and consistently failing to master the framework yet have started to make progress on moving the needles that matter, you should persist with the adoption and implementation of scrum and focus on incremental improvement.
The team don’t have to be great at scrum to start delivering results and you can take comfort in the fact that a poor performing scrum team is producing better results than a good, seasoned, and experienced?project management?team.
As the team’s?agile capabilities grow, so should the impact of their efforts.
Slow is smooth and smooth is steady.
So, in closing, you could find that the team are battling to find their feet with the scrum framework and yet their performance against business goals and objectives demonstrate that this experiment is working. That the adoption is a success.
Trending
A?scrum team?might be the textbook example of what scrum looks and feels like, and yet their performance against business goals and objectives demonstrate that there is a decrease in velocity, impact, and value for both customer and the organisation.
That would indicate that?agile is not creating?or capturing value for the organization and should be abandoned in favour of a new experiment or approach.
This article first appeared on https://www.growingscrummasters.com/deploy-improve-scrum/how-would-you-determine-the-success-of-agile-within-your-organization/
About John McFadyen
If you are interested in becoming an agile coach and value mentored, coach-driven skills development in your journey to mastery, visit our?Growing Scrum Masters?website.
For more information on John McFadyen, connect with John on LinkedIn at?https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/johnmcfadyen/.
If you like the idea of becoming a scrum master and want to achieve internationally recognised and certified accreditation as a scrum master, visit our?Certified Scrum Master?(CSM) course page.
If you are already a scrum master and want to upskill to a more advanced level of knowledge and agile coaching capability, visit our?Advanced Certified Scrum Master?(A-CSM) course page.
If you have several years’ experience as a scrum master and want to validate and certify your professional skills, visit our?Certified Scrum Professional Scrum Master?(CSP-SM) course page.