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Question:

What are the Top 5 or 10 metrics that you choose at Team, Program, Portfolio level, and also for DevOps and Quality/testing area and why? Also, what key metrics you showcase to Business to engage them positively. It is a financial service based company already following agile at scale and has a complete CI/CD pipeline in place.

Answer:

For an interview, the purpose may be interviewer wants to understand what all metrics you know, and for that, you might use the above metrics mentioned. For practical purposes, the first thing I think we should ask is what is the goal of metrics and what specific questions they want to answer? Like if they want velocity what exactly they would like to understand from velocity. We need to understand those first.

To guide them is a nice thought. but we humans make judgment calls often on these metrics :) that's where the whole problem lies. People try to inflate metrics. So teams need safety first, probably the reason why any metrics in general theoretically sound fine but won't work practically.

At the team level or program level or any level. We must try to improve relentlessly and try to deliver more value with better quality. I know this sounds very generic, but I think that's where teams should start thinking about what metrics better suit them.

Team level

- Sprint burndown/burnup, Velocity, Estimation Variance, Scope Variance, Backlog Health, cycle time (Time to build, Time to Value), lead time, throughput, CFD, Escape Defects, Cost of Each Sprint, Cost of Rework, Escape Defects, Defect Density, Build Efficiency, Planned velocity vs actual velocity. Agile Maturity Assessment at each team level

Program level

- Program velocity, Program Predictability Measure (PPM), ROI, customer satisfaction, feature progress, PI Progress, Deployments and releases per PI, pl/release burndown by iteration, Agile Maturity Assessment at Program Level (ART level), Defect Density, % of test automation coverage, the success rate of builds

Portfolio Level: 

NPS, Team Happiness index

Do we have the magic to transform any organization or person?

If someone says, we have transformed, or we will transform by XYZ days: That does not work.

A builder, who can build in major cities, cannot build in the desert. Unless you do field study or some research on the area, he is going to construct or build: 

-> You have to study the team, firm, how organization work

-> What works in one firm /one location doesn’t work in another place

• Gandhi fought for the freedom movement in India. Nelson Mandel in South Africa. You cannot interchange them in different India and south-Africa.

To build a self-organizing team, you need to follow

1. Resources /team to be collocated.

2. Spacious team rooms

3. Management, who does not interfere.

4. Dedicated team, who has great respect and courage to take-up challenges.

Framework followers

1. Just because one framework worked in the project, works in another project

2. What works in Spotify doesn’t work in another firm.

Divide and conquer

1. If you want to move “mountain.”

•  you have to make “mountain” into pieces
• Could you ship it, reconstruct it?
•  That’s all you are done.

2. Likewise you need to have incremental steps, to achieve a goal