"Oh for goodness sake, you put it in upside down!"
"I'm sorry, Secret. I thought the pointy end went in first."
-Secret Squirrel and Morrocco Mole, Secret Squirrel
I'm always excited to learn something new, and this week a colleague introduced me to the "" concept of measuring the performance of a change program such as an agile transformation. He also introduced me to the "Secret Squirrel (and Morocco Mole)" Hannah-Barbera cartoon series from the 1960s, which briefly seemed to be a more interesting thing to discuss, but I'm pretty sure you guys should all pursue that on your own without further commentary from me. We agilists are a fun bunch.
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| From wikipedia |
Seriously, though, this Lead/Lag thing gets you exactly where you want to be as you design your agile transformation, and it keeps you from drowning in a pool of agile purism. "Is not Scrum/Is so Scrum" is not the discussion you want to be having for very long, especially when accompanied by ineffectual slapping. You want to be looking at "Is not valuable/Is so valuable." And yet if you solely focus on "what is valuable for the business," what makes you different as an agilist from anyone else?
This is a serious question and I will conjecture that some of us in the agile/lean community focus so much on "pure" agile behaviors because we are worried we will lose our identity if we throw ourselves whole-heartedly into a process of self-improvement which deviates from some well-known agile or lean script. Witness the large-scale prejudice of the agile community against the PMI and the BABOK. We've got excellent pioneers working to put PMI/BABOK/CMM insights to work in agile shops, but they need to be very brave and very impervious to sarcasm.
Anyway, enter the Lead/Lag indicators, perhaps in a Secret Squirrel flying saucer. The lean/lag concept, as most of you probably already knew, is one where you purposely track two sets of measures over time with the expectation that they will correlate. For an agile transformation, the "lead" measures would be things like:
- Do you have teams that develop iteratively?
- Is there a card wall? and even
- Would Jeff Sutherland certify this team as one following "pure Scrum"?
You can empirically measure how many teams you have that do these things over time, and how well those teams are doing your local form of agile "correctly," as specified for your company, and this i