The Agile-ometer

Watch Rob’s video

Watch the video, or see below for more details on this powerful tool.

Why use it

It’s easy to get lost in the agile trees and lose sight of the forest: metrics, ceremonies, frameworks, tools. The Agile-ometer helps you zoom-out and reflect on how agile you really are, quickly and simply.

It doesn’t judge, and it says nothing about how agile you should be. That depends on your work and your context. If the problem is simple, low-risk and predictable, a planned, linear approach may serve you well. But the tool can help you decide how agile you want to be.

What it measures

The Agile-ometer looks at just two things:

1. How quickly and how often value is delivered to the customer.
2. How quickly and how often feedback from the customer is gathered and acted on.

The “customer” is whoever is meant to benefit from what you deliver. The two go hand in hand. A common trap is to deliver what we think is valuable, only to find it isn’t as valuable to the customer as we imagined. Seeking and acting on feedback is how we learn what value really is.

The levels

Level 0: Linear waterfall. Requirements, design, build and test happen in sequence, with value and feedback only at the very end. It’s the opposite of agile, which is why it scores zero. In complex work, fixing the requirements up front and following a set plan rarely ends well for the customer.

Level 1: Staged build. Some requirements and design up front (perhaps as a long “Sprint 0”), then building in increments in a largely straight line. There is little backlog refinement, because the backlog was filled in at the start.

Level 2: Apparently agile. It looks agile: a vision, a roadmap and a high-level backlog, refined just in time for each iteration, perhaps following Scrum. But value delivery and customer feedback are left so late that adapting to them is costly, or too late.

Level 3: Feedback every iteration. Customer feedback is gathered every increment or iteration, at reviews and demos or by working closely with the customer, and, crucially, acted on. Feedback without action is waste.

Level 4: Value every iteration. Feedback is acted on every iteration, and value reaches the customer every iteration too. The customer doesn’t wait months, or years, to benefit.

Level 5: Continuous flow. Value is delivered as soon as it’s ready, not tied to the end of an iteration, perhaps many times a week or a day. Customer feedback is sought and acted on continually. Continuous delivery and continuous discovery are part of how you work.

Between levels

Your answer won’t always be a whole number. If you act on feedback every iteration but deliver value only every other iteration, on average, you might call it 3.5.

What about delivering value without feedback?

You could add a level (or two) for delivering value often without seeking feedback. It’s left out to keep the model simple, and because if you never ask for feedback, how do you know you delivered value at all?

Using it with a team

Put the diagram on a wall or a virtual whiteboard, or draw it yourself. Ask everyone to place a dot where they think the team is now. Then, in a different colour, where they think it should be. The spread of dots is often the most interesting part: use it to draw out insights, evidence, debate and actions. It works well as a team or team-of-teams retrospective, or as a “futurespective”.

Questions to ask

Want to use the Agile-ometer with your teams? Message Rob on LinkedIn.