Update: In early 2022, a product reboot has happened, which pivoted the product much more towards setting goals (OKRs) but still has its roots in teamwork, metrics, and evidence-based management.
Agile Tools is focusing on metrics, for now. Each of us has a different experience with them – most likely, not a pleasant one. We believe there is a bright side to metrics. We believe metrics can help you get better!
Let’s meet four characters, typical users of Agile Tools.
Betty Orlovsky
She is the Business Owner, representing top management.
Betty represents a CEO, a director, a top internal person responsible for transformational change.
Betty is a persona who can articulate the Why of the organization and the Why of the change which must happen during the next years. She is the persona leading the organization towards better business agility – usually with help from consultants, change agents.
Betty
will be able to see an aggregated result of progress (or lack of),
will be able to make decisions based on evidence,
will be able to create consultancy contracts for external change agents tied to success,
will not lose money by wasting time building in-house metrics systems (not enough knowledge).
Peter Owen
He is a Product Owner, representing one or several product owners/managers.
Guys like Peter (should) have the competence and the power of making decisions about what gets built.
Since we are in an era of agile product development we are already feeling a shift from a project to a product mindset. Just a few words for those not yet initiated: The word “project” consists of two parts “pro” and “ject”. The first one means “before” and the second one means “doing”. From this, somewhere in the ’50s, the famous triangle of project management emerged: scope-time-budget, which means one person, the project manager, is responsible for the project to be delivered on time, on scope, on budget.
The project is a sequential order of these activities: plan, analyze, design, implement, test, release. A business plan is created upfront, the analysis phase follows, the architects then create a solution based on an analytical input. The development team gets detailed specifications, then the testers do their work and finally, the product gets released to customers. Ignoring market feedback and the customers is a well-known recipe for failure. There are better ways. Agile ways.
Peter
will be able to set and monitor goals for products,
will be able to measure the progress of improving product development,
will be able to decide based on facts, therefore steering the product development.
Later on, Peter will have all kinds of tools, not only metrics, available to help him in product development.
Sandy Mahoney
He is a Scrum Master.
Don’t be deceived by a young face, the role of Scrum Master is a complex one. A career path is emerging for this profession, transitioning from team-level, multi team-level, cross-department level, all the way to organization and enterprise organization-level coach.
Sandy the Scrum Master offers services to the Product Owner, to the Development team, and to the Organization. You can read more about this in Scrum Guide.
Sandy
will be able to input and monitor goals for teams, selected by each team, fostering cooperation,
together with the development team will be able to improve the development team’s engineering & process skills, contributing to increased business agility of the organization
will be able to increase the Ability to Innovate, decrease Time to Market, increase Current Value by having a tool giving valuable evidence of progress (or lack of) in selected areas facilitating the necessary change.
Sara Dexter
She is a Software Developer.
Sara represents not only coders but designers, user experience guys, testers of all kinds, HTML wizards, sound professionals, analysts, javascript gurus, technical writers, hardware programmers, in short, any profession representative that exists and is necessary to build the product.
Sara currently has no direct use of the Agile Tools besides deciding together with fellow team members which metrics to choose in pursuit of getting better in day-to-day work.
But, there is a great agenda for Sara for later Agile Tools milestones!
We believe there is a bright side of metrics. We believe metrics can help you get better!
Update: In early 2022, a product reboot has happened, which pivoted the product much more towards setting goals (OKRs) but still has its roots in teamwork, metrics, and evidence-based management.
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