The results of agile metrics can provide analysis from different perspectives before a closer look. At the end of each Sprint, it is common to perform an analysis of the results achieved in relation to what was planned.

However, many teams reduce this moment only to a descriptive analysis of what happened. Where they inspect the superficiality of problems, or even worse, turn it into a status report moment.

Carry out the Retrospective that promotes the continuous improvement of your team .

The Retrospective is the time to observe, examine and reflect on how the team is working and promote continuous improvement. Therefore, it is an occasion to help the team explore new opportunities and solutions to achieve the best results. Therefore, for both the team and the organization, it is necessary to pay attention to agile metrics is of paramount importance.

Metric: Throughput

It is related to delivery capacity and is defined as the number of deliveries in a given period in which they met the definition of ready.

Know what to do with Throughput, master the flow and get more results .

In this aspect, it is not worth continuously seeking to increase the quantity of items that will be delivered. But rather measure, manage, adapt to increase value from what is being delivered.

Metric: Capacity

To better manage the agile team, pay attention to the number of deliveries that will be possible to complete within the Sprint period. Because, overloading or having work idle, represents waste with the consequent reduction of the generated value.

Master Capacity: How to Estimate Work Capacity in Agile Teams.

The more you know the team’s capacity, the better you will plan effectively. That way, understand how much work they can do with a focus on defining the product.

Metric: Lead Time Breakdown

Once you understand capacity and quantity, consider how long it will take to deliver new features, services or products. Soon, you will get knowledge about the duration with which deliveries are made. In addition, it is also important to pay attention to time, if it meets the needs of customers’ perception of value.

At the same time, it is necessary to consider each stage of the value stream with its respective duration. By reducing non-value added activities, you will be able to eliminate inefficiencies and waste.

Focus on what really generates value with Lead time Breakdown .

Agile Metrics and Company Results

The sum of the results of each team contributes to the company achieving its goals and results. The teams represent the gears that fit together and make what has been planned happen.

So by promoting continuous improvement and leveraging maturity, each team member will feel valued, generating engagement and commitment to results.

Empower people in your company using beefor. In addition to making these and other metrics available, the platform brings together several agile practices. With each one of them, you will achieve more than managing the entire value stream, it will also elevate the maturity of the teams so that they are amazing.

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CFD chart: understand and improve the value stream

CFD Chart – Cumulative Flow Diagram – translating to Portuguese cumulative flow diagram, are stacked area charts that show the number of items in each phase of the value stream.

In other words, CFD Chart is formed through the horizontal axis of the timeline and in the vertical the amount of work items presented cumulatively. In other words, it represents the “picture” of the value stream on a given day, indicating the amount present at each specific stage.

In this way, the CFD Chart is able to demonstrate answers to, for example, these questions:

• 01- Is the team making deliveries continuously?
• 02- Is there a bottleneck at any point in the flow?
• 03- Is the amount of completed items increasing?
• 04- Does the delivery cadence follow a sustainable pace?

Understanding the CFD Chart

The greater the distance between the step lines, the more items are present at the time of measurement in the process part. Consequently, if it is related to the phase of unfinished items, the number of work in progress will be high, that is, the Work in Process (WiP). Hence the importance of having clear limit policies and identifying the break-even point without creating bottlenecks and achieving continuous delivery.

So, as you begin to understand reading the CFD Chart and how items behave within each step of the value stream, you can ask the right questions to correlate with other metrics or data and make improvements that can generate value.

Through experience using the beefor platform will be able to analyze flow metrics. Also, use the data to implement continuous improvements aimed at stabilizing the product/service value stream.

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The improvement is in the details

Finally, analyzing the result data of each stage of the value stream from various perspectives allows for a holistic view of the variables that need to be optimized. Articles in this series of metrics that might interest you:

• throughput ;
• CycleTime ;
• Capacity ;
• Lead Time Breakdown .

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Cycle Time measures how long it takes for a demand from the beginning of development to go through all stages of the flow to completion. The formula to calculate it for each item is quite simple:

Cycle Time = End Time – Start Time

The time being calculated in hours or days, according to what makes sense in the context applied .
According to the customer’s view, what matters is Lead Time, because through it it is possible to measure the total time it takes for the work to go through the value stream, starting at the moment it is requested until its completion/delivery. In turn, the Cycle Time represents the time the team needs to develop the item.

beefor measures Cycle Time

beefor brings as one of the main indicators of agility the Cycle Time metric that is automatically measured from the frames that the team uses for its workflow. In this way, it is easy to visualize the average lifetime of the demands performed by the team.

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How to Improve Cycle Time

Understanding how the Cycle Time result is behaving is the first step to knowing how effective the execution phase is. Therefore, the agile team must observe, examine and reflect on how it is working based on the results of this metric and promote actions aimed at continuous improvement in the meeting of Retrospective.

Also know about: Leadtime Breakdown , OKRs and Continuous Improvement .

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Organizations are continually taking adaptive actions so that the customer experience is the best and incredible possible. When starting this constant journey for improvement, it will demand from the teams the creation of mechanisms that respond to this need, revolutionaryly establishing increasingly better levels of deliveries.

This means that each sprint is never equal to the other, both in terms of the value generated in the customer’s perception and for the team. That’s why it’s necessary to know:

• How to measure the improvements offered by agility;
• How much does it deliver through Throughput;
• How long to deliver by Leadtime.

Measuring the time from the beginning of demand to delivery of the product/service to the customer in a total way hides variations in the value stream. As this time span is large and there are several steps to reach the end, it is essential to know which stages of the flow take longer, their restrictions and also where there are bottlenecks or impediments.

Leadtime Breakdown

It is a measure of how much time passes between task creation, highlighting the duration of each phase until the work is completed. With this, it is possible to assess how much time each item took to reach the definition of ready for that phase and be able to move on to the next one. You can start with Lead Time, but you need to “slice” it according to the duration of each step of the process.

The visualization can be done through the accumulated bar graph of each phase, where on the horizontal axis the work items and on the vertical it shows the duration time.

By making it transparent to the team’s inspection, you will find baselines and benchmarks for each type of work item. These more detailed historical references can support more accurate estimates as well as possible improvements.

Improving Leadtime Breakdown

By constantly analyzing what is going through or what has already gone through the flow, it allows you to identify problems such as:

• Waits;
• Stage duration variations;
• Restrictions;
• Bottlenecks etc.

The more visible to the team the proportion of each step, the easier it will be to propose improvement actions. The intention is for the item to advance in a constant and predictable manner and, according to each scenario, improvement actions can be taken such as:

• Limit WIP- limit the amount of running items;
• Synchronize queues – act where items have restrictions or bottlenecks in your process;
• Reduce waits;
• Define upper and lower limits to act on the time variations of each step;

It is possible to manage the portfolio with beefor, the platform provides better synchronization between the end and beginning of each stage, giving more fluidity and improving the leadtime of your product/service.

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Also know about: Capacity, Sprint Planning and Sprint Review.

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