December 9, 2023
Today we begin the read of Actionable Agile Metrics Volume II, Advanced Topics in Predictability by Daniel S. Vacanti. This is the second of Mr. Vacanti’s books we have covered in Re-read Saturday. The 260-page book includes a Preface, 14 Chapters broken into two sections, two appendices, endnotes, a bibliography, and an index (hooray).
(more…)October 15, 2023
This week we are on our annual holiday. We are toiling away editing audio and doing voice exercises to bring you new and exciting content and will be back next week! In the SPaMCAST 777 we re-release SPaMCAST 486 – Daniel S Vacanti, Actionable Agile Metrics. The idea of flow metrics has fundamentally changed my perspective on how to use metrics. I have to thank Mr. Vacanti for starting me on the path. Enjoy the interview.
(more…)October 4, 2022
Work In Process (WIP) is a simple concept. The simplest definition of WIP is any piece of work started and that isn’t complete. It does not matter whether it is being worked on or waiting for a decision or the next step in the process. If a team pulls two pieces of work and starts working only to discover that they need to have a meeting in a week to decide on a course of action, they both are still WIP even if nothing much is going on until the meeting. One of the bumper sticker sayings that define agile is that teams should “stop starting and start finishing”. The basic meaning is that starting too many pieces of work causes teams to finish less work than they should. Having too much WIP has all sorts of implications. A straightforward implication is that the higher the WIP a team has the more time they will spend switching between work items. That means more thrashing occurs. The linear relationship between increased WIP and increased context switching is true for teams, organizations, and individuals. I have always struggled with moderating my own WIP. I like saying yes. I adopted the idea of a 5 item shortlist when I read Monotasking by Staffan Nöteberg (check out my re-read of Chapter 2, Cut Down on Tasks to Do). The shortlist helps control my WIP by throttling work entry. It has been a huge impact by reducing the number of items on my active to-do list that I am ignoring. Less WIP means less neglected WIP, less cognitive load worrying about the work I am ignoring, and more things done at the end of the day. Work that has started and waiting while teams pull other work generates neglected WIP.
(more…)December 13, 2020
This week we are staying with metrics and Manning Publications for a chat with Christopher W H Davis, author of Agile Metrics in Action, How to Measure and Improve Team Performance. Why more metrics? Well first, the M in SPaMCAST is for metrics. Secondly, metrics are important tools for teams and organizations when used wisely. Many in the agile world hear the term metric or measure and run screaming from the room. I asked Chris if he thought combining ‘metics’ and ‘agile’ was an oxymoron – he thinks not.
After you have listened, buy a copy of Chris’s book using the link http://mng.bz/r2Og Don’t pay full price by using the discount code podspam20 to get a 40% discount code (good for all Manning products in all formats).
(more…)December 6, 2020
This week Dave Nicolette, author of Software Development Metrics from Manning Publications, and I talk about pragmatically using metrics. Dave and I talked about the value teams get from measurement regardless of the approach you are taking to deliver value. Measurement is feedback and measurement is leadership for guiding and improving how work is done.
After you have listened I think you will want a copy of Dave’s book on metrics. Use the link: http://mng.bz/r2Og Also, yes there is more, you say you don’t want to pay full price? Use the discount code podspam20 to get a 40% discount code (good for all Manning products in all formats).
(more…)January 21, 2020
Measuring or assessing customer satisfaction is a fact of life for products and services for organizations that deliver to their customers. I receive several every day. Each text, email and phone call asking my opinion tells me that my opinion matters. The process of determining whether customers are happy is a form of attention. Internal customers are not always paid the same compliment, this is a rectifiable mistake. There are multiple ways to collect customer satisfaction data (a sample of techniques are in Customer Satisfaction Metrics and Quality) the next four segments of the blog are not going to focus on data collection techniques, but rather on internal customer satisfaction measurement rationale and infrastructure. Spending time upfront to understand whether what you are doing solves a problem or is a sustainable process is important. None of this is easy and doubly so because most collecting and analyzing the data aren’t marketing or market research personnel. There are four areas that need to consider before you send your first survey or schedule your first stakeholder interview. (more…)
March 7, 2019
Are you measuring a team effort?
**Reprint**
Productivity is used to evaluate how efficiently an organization converts inputs into outputs. However, productivity measures can and often are misapplied for a variety of reasons ranging from simple misunderstanding to gaming the system. Many misapplications of productivity measurement cause organizational behavior problems both from leaders and employees. Five of the most common productivity-related behavioral problems are: (more…)
March 5, 2019
**Reprint**
Productivity is a classic economic metric that measures the process of creating goods and services. Productivity is the ratio of the amount of output from a team or organization per unit of input. Conceptually productivity is a simple metric. In order to calculate the metric, you would simply sum up the number of units of item produced and divide it by the amount “stuff” needed to make those units. For example, if a drain cleaning organization of three people cleans 50 drains per month, their labor productivity per month would be 50/3 = 16.6 drains per person. The metric is a sign of how efficiently a team or organization has organized and managed the piece of work being measured. There are four types of productivity. Each type of productivity focuses on a different part of the supply chain needed to deliver a product or a service. The four types are: (more…)
June 21, 2018
Before we dive in – let’s begin a new poll for the next book in our Re-read Saturday. I have had a number of suggestions:
Pick two and we will start on the top choice! Note: There are two books on the list that will be first reads for me (I will let you guess). All of these books are very relevant to agile, lean and process improvement.
Whether you like the word transformation or not, many in the process improvement and agile communities help to facilitate change. Involvement in any non-trivial change effort requires resources, people, support and the expenditure of political capital. If change uses an organization’s people and assets someone will ask what the return on those assets are and whether those assets could return more if used elsewhere. I can tell (and often have told) a great story about the impact of a good working environment, doing the right work, and good processes. The response I get to my rationale on the value of being agile is ‘can you prove it.’ Can you prove it’ translates directly into ‘can you measure it’, and ‘are those measures meaningful?’ A model for answering that question that I am sketching out at a program or organization level has to answer the following questions:
June 12, 2018
Progress is easy to visualize when we use the yardstick of calendar time. My wife and I spent 17 days in Europe. There are 197 shopping days until Christmas (as of June 12, 2018) — I expect presents this year. How long it takes to deliver a piece of work, in days, is something nearly every human can understand. Over the past few months, I have been cataloging questions I have heard. Well over 70% of work-related questions center on how long a piece of work will take and whether the answer to that question has value. Cycle time metrics are ways to generate answers to ‘how long’ questions in a manner that is valuable and predictable. (more…)
Software Process and Measurement 