I was asked recently what things I’d look at to determine if a team or group is improving and there are three main areas. In all three cases, none of these prove that improvement is happening. What they do provide is a place to me to start asking questions so that I can discover more.
- Flow metrics
- Value delivered
- Improvement activities
Flow metrics
Flow metrics tell me about the activity in the system. WIP, throughput, cycle time and work item aging are the ones I’d start with. I’d be looking for patterns in the system, not individual numbers.
For example if we see a clear pattern that cycle times are either increasing or decreasing then that implies that changes are happening in the system. Not all change will be improvement but all improvement requires change. If we see change, we can look closer to see if it’s good. If there isn’t change then we can safely say there’s no improvement in that area.
Not all change will be improvement but all improvement requires change. Look for the change.
Value delivered
Value delivered is the next and this one can be hard to measure simply because value comes in many forms. Are we finishing things that our customers consider valuable? Are we getting a return on our investment (ROI) for those things and is it the ROI that we had expected?
If our flow metrics look great but value delivered is not then we’ve optimized for being busy and that’s not helpful. We’re already great at being busy.
Remember that we don’t get credit for things that are still in progress. If it isn’t finished then there is no value.
Improvement activities
Lastly, I’d look at the kinds of improvement activities that the team has selected for themselves. Often these come out of formal retrospectives, although these could have come up at any time. I’m looking to see if the activities they select are superficial (ie “be on time”) or substantial (ie “we don’t have enough autonomy in this area and want to change that”).
It’s ok to have the occasional superficial items but if they’re always superficial then it’s highly likely that the team is stuck and not improving.