I get asked “What’s next? Exactly what is ‘Post-Agile’ “? I then hear that Kanban or Lean Startup are the answers to all of our problems, along with the 200 or so new scaling Agile frameworks that have appeared on the market.
There is a tendency to jump to solutions and answers before properly understanding the problems or identifying the desired outcomes. Imposing a new process won’t deliver the right results if you’re tackling the wrong problem.
What do you currently measure? Most metrics efforts seem to focus on the throughput or output measures.
Throughput measures tend to cover how fast you get through the work. Examples from Agile teams are things like ‘number of items completed’ or ‘total story points’ completed during an iteration. Lean teams might use cycle time, or how long it takes a similar sized item to move from the beginning of the lifecycle to when it is launched.
Output would include Lines of Code, features or function points completed.
Throughput tells us how fast we go, output tells us how much we delivered. But why are we doing any of this work? What are the problems we are trying to solve? What are the business results we desire?