Veronique Skelsey, Senior Consultant
In the fast-paced world of asset and wealth management, Agile metrics are a strategic asset. They provide crucial insights that help firms become more efficient, improve client satisfaction and build robust operations that that can adapt to market changes, client needs and regulatory requirements. This article explores the fundamental ‘Dos and Don’ts’ of Agile metrics to support your strategic decision-making and operational workflows.
Agile Metrics support what are known as the "Pillars of Scrum" (which are equally relevant whether you're working in Scrum, Kanban or any other framework):
These principles should be at the heart of everything you do with Agile metrics.
Do:
Don't:
Do:
Don't:
Simply stated, Goodhart's Law says: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
Think about what you're measuring and the insights and outcomes you'd like to achieve.
There are 5 key metrics that can help ensure good team health and effective delivery:
A team should be looking at improving the outcomes NOT the numbers.
The Say/Do Ratio compares what a team initially put into a sprint to what they completed by the end. It is desirable to get the number of items completed as close to the number committed as possible because it improves predictability by ensuring fewer items roll over to subsequent sprints; thereby making it easier to forecast when backlog items will be completed, resulting in happier stakeholders.
A team who is asked what is causing their Say/Do Ratio to be so divergent and to think of ways that they could improve the situation may conclude that their stories are too big and need to be broken down to make it easier to track their progress and complete them within a sprint, or they may be adding items to a sprint that still have outstanding questions or unresolved dependencies which means that they're not really "ready" for them to start work and results in incomplete items at the end of sprint. They may be doing a lot of support work which is unaccounted for in their sprint planning or saying "yes" to mid-sprint requests without considering the priorities and the impact. They can come up with ideas to try and address the problems: ensuring stories are small enough to fit comfortably in a sprint (or preferably within a few days), or creating and mandating a Definition of Ready, or including capacity considerations during sprint planning, for instance.
A team who is asked to get their Say/Do ratio closer to 100% will often do exactly as they're asked, by trying to fix the numbers. They may do this by becoming overly risk-averse and only putting a small number of items into a sprint at the start, and then pulling items in as the sprint progresses. They may "close" items in the sprint before they're truly complete (i.e. before they've met the Acceptance Criteria and Definition of Done) and then create a duplicate or "part two" item in the next sprint. These "fixes" affect transparency and have a detrimental effect on predictability, making it hard to understand what is complete and releasable, and hard to forecast when items will be delivered.
As Steve Jobs said: “Incentive structures work. So you have to be very careful of what you incent people to do, because various incentive structures create all sorts of consequences that you can’t anticipate.”
Agile metrics are essential for continuous improvement of teams and processes but remember the goal is to improve outcomes, not just the numbers. Delve deep into what they reveal to not only predict outcomes more accurately but also enhance operational agility and client satisfaction. At Liqueo, we proudly specialise in asset and wealth management and are ready to guide you through the complexities of becoming Agile throughout your organisation. Our team’s deep domain expertise means you can trust our recommendations are tailored to meet your specific needs and will always be rooted in our understanding of the impact on the intricacies of your trade flow and broader operating model. If you are interested in how we can help you implement successful programmes or want more information about Ways of Working, contact us.
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