Evidence Based Management for Scrum

Evidence Base Management (EBM) is an management framework that uses evidence and metrics.  Execs & Middle mgmt don't get insight and normal forecasts.  EBM framework to help management move the company.  The mgmt can use evidence to drive the business forward.  Inspect and adapt using evidence.  I like to keep everything simple and move towards a more complex mature set of measurements as the easiest metrics to implement provide early value to the project.

"Evidence-Based Management is a framework organizations can use to help them measure, manage, and increase the value they derive from their product delivery."  Scrum.org

Examples Types of metrics you may want to measure:

1. Velocity
2. Sprint Burn downs
3. Versioning - versions of product or bugs requiring multiple fixes
4. Code Coverage & Code Analysis
5. Missed bugs/escaped bugs - bugs missed in a release
6. Issues/Failed Deployments
7. Team happiness - capture metrics in Sprint Retrospective from the team
8. Financial measure - cost to delivery
9. Average User Story completion time per team (identify outliers and average for each team.  Do from started status to completed status).
10. Average story points per team, factoring in the number of team members over multiple sprints (don't compare teams as their unit size is not consistent across teams; if you do try standardize, the teams will give more points to fake outperforming other teams).

Help management nudge the teams and company in the right directions.  To get these metrics, need to explicitly determine what the goals are, so can figure out KPI and we are measuring this right things.  Ensure the management goals are SMART (Specific: Well defined, clear, and unambiguous) or use OKR framework to define goals to figure out the metrics to collect.  Ensure the metrics are important to the goals of the company or team.   Consider using
"Objectives and key results (OKR) is a goal-setting framework that helps organizations define goals — or objectives — and then track the outcome."  cio.com

Common KPI's:  

1. Escaped Defects
2. Defects in the last 14 days
3. In Progress Features and User Stories per team
4. Team velocity
5. Stories completed vs stories committed
6. Tech debt (know issue, items skipped)
7. Team burndown charts

A couple of columns and dashboard widgets for summarizing progress in DevOps:

1. Progress by User Story Total minus remaining rolling up to features.
2. Progress by Work Items in a feature - get user stories, tasks, spikes that make up the feature and shows % of artefacts completed within the feature.
3. Epic Progress - each epic show the number of features and number of feature completed e.g. 3 of 11 feature completed.
4. Number of "In Progress" feature or User stories per scrum team - very useful to check a team is using and updating artefacts proactively.
5. Priority committed and done using priority or WSJF.

Three goals of KPI's in Scrum:

1. Measure deliverables
2. Measure team ability to deliver business value
3. Measure the scrum team itself

Agile & Scrum Series
Agile for SharePoint
Scrum for SharePoint - Part 1
Scrum for SharePoint - Part 2
Scrum - Part 3 - Scaling Scrum 
Scrum - Part 4 - Kanban and Scrum 
Scrum - Part 5 - Certification PSM 
Scrum - Part 6 - Evidence Based Management (This post)