Unconventional Business Intelligence Metrics for Scaling Agile
Having a discussion in a meetup lately , there was an aura of SAFe being the framework of choice for the enterprise scalability. Although in discussion with some of the experts in the meet and from the reference to the SAFe web page , there are certain metrics that can be measured at @program level but are they really enough? . Not all the metrics like CFD are interpreted and customer focused but then what are some of the metrics which in a PM/Consultant/Customer Advocate can always lean on?. Well its not always the conventional metrics but other non conventional program/project characteristics that indicates healthy customer delivery and CSAT.
NPS (Net Promoter Score): NPS is an excellent tool to gauge customer success and in turn customer locality. If a company wishes for repeat business, buy more, act as a reference, advocates for it publicly, then with NPS , more success potential is promised and a ‘good fit’ customer. I have written more on NPS some time back. Please read the complete article here. A feedback loop of NPS fed into the PI or SOS planning can help to integrate the teams effort better.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nps-how-customer-success-anil-yadav/
Transactional CSAT: TCSAT mulls the experience a customer has had in a particular transaction/interaction ie called a touch point. This CSAT is designed, not to measure customer loyalty, but satisfaction with a Company LOB in order to improve it. A typical TCAST maps the values from the touchpoint ( a value derived at by a formula) to the Q on Q basis. For SOS at program level , a liner TCSAT is indicative that the delivery is matching the Program Goals. The touch points are at the middle or end of a PI ( as in SAFe) or at during and end of a release in scrum.
Unique Visitors : This metric tracks how customer visit your storefront or website. The dev/operation teams needs to ensure that the visits are unique This metric is at the top of metric “funnel” (ie. each other metric is a smaller number than this one and expressed as a percentage/proportion). The dev/operation teams should make sure that they do not put too much emphasis on this metric. It is usually used by eCommerce companies and some startups to showcase their hits. . If the numbers are small , then you should probably put try to increase conversion rate.
Mean time between releases (MTTR): Note that its the Mean time to Release and not repair. Its a customer focus metric and customer needs to know how the releases are made. In simple definition , its the average amount of time between the time that a release is done. Things to consider on this are :
a)Only deployments to a prod environment are counted.
b)Count only successful deployments.
c)The deployment is technical and may not be for the customer . It might be a canary or blue — green deployment or a feature flagged off etc: but it still counts
Also many a times the Go — No Go decisions are made with customers and these fixes frequency can make or break those decisions.
SP,QF, HF per Release:Its a measure of how many fixes category you are deploying to the prod . The Service Pack(SP) , Quick Fix (QF) and Hot Fixes (HF) deployment shows instability in the prod and the dev team takes meticulous effort to ensure that the deployments are to the T. Also in cases of a rollback , the deployed package is rolled back with no residual artifacts left in the Prod. But for customer , its a stability vs instability metric.
For more on SP and QF refer my articles as below
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/production-issues-hot-fixes-scrum-anil-yadav/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/production-issues-service-packs-scrum-anil-yadav/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/production-issues-fix-packs-scrum-anil-yadav/
In Conclusion : The program teams are liable to keep a healthy pipeline while integrating the code at various stages but cannot ignore that metrics external to their practice could be a sign of either improvement or deterioration of the product. As they scale more and more, a robust development cycle with multiple checkpoint at various stages not only help the overall release frequency but adds to the business value .
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