An Agile Transformation Dashboard

An effective Agile Transformation Dashboard should provide clear, actionable insights into both progress in the adoption of Agile practices and whether they’re delivering value. The dashboard can be a primary artifact supporting a transformation and will be useful for executive teams, Agile coaches, and delivery teams, connecting strategic outcomes with team-level progress. We want to track 4 fundamental aspects of a transformation:

1. Agile Practice Adoption
2. Delivery Performance Metrics
3. Team Health
4. Outcome Metrics

1. Agile Practice Adoption

Agile Practice Adoption Progress: Let’s say we have identified 20 key practices that we want all teams to adopt to get to a foundational agility level (Properly formed teams, backlogs that enable agility and the ability to plan and deliver value predictability).  A stacked bar chart showing how many practices each team has successfully adopted (meeting the acceptance criteria for that practice):

Agile practices are adopted in support of overall business goals, and these goals may have been formulated using OKRs. Progress versus OKR completion should be tracked to confirm that agile practice adoption is having the desired impact. See Section 4 below.

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2. Delivery Metrics

Cycle Time Metrics. Cycle Time is the elapsed time from an item entering entering a process and departing. That is. the amount of time an item spends in the ‘In Progress’ state, or the amount of time an item spends as ‘Work In Progress’. Or, the amount of time an item spends inside a process: Between To Do and Done. The Cycle Time Histogram using past cycle time data can be used to forecast likely delivery times. This can give a measure of  predictability. The example chart below says that 75% of items are completed in 5 days or less. To summarize for a list of teams, a table showing number of days to complete 75% of items would be a good way to present it.

Throughput. Throughput is the number of items completed by a process per unit of time. Units can be anything meaningful for your operation: per hour, per day, per week, or per sprint, and so on. On a CFD Chart throughput is the slope of the cumulative done line.

A Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) is an Area Chart that shows how work is flowing through a development process — and can be used to determine whether a delivery process is stable. 

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3. Agile Team Health Metrics

Team health metrics can be derived from surveys that should be run on at least a quarterly basis and even monthly if related issues are being actively addressed. Team Health Survey example here.

A Team Health Heatmap is a color-coded matrix showing team satisfaction, engagement, autonomy, clarity, etc. over time.

While the Team Health Heatmap shows trends over time, a Team Health Radar Chart can provide a detailed snapshot for individual teams or for an organization overall.

4. Strategic Outcome Metrics

Agile transformation must have an impact on 3 fundamental dimensions of any enterprise:

• Product: The organization’s effectiveness in delivering its products or services.
• Customers: The organization’s ability to attract customers and retain them.
• Employees: The organization’s ability to attract employees and keep them motivated.

Improved performance in each of these areas contributes to ultimate business outcomes of increased revenues, reduced operating costs and improved margins.

Organizations must be able to connect the impact of specific transformation actions to their target outcomes. A framework is needed that connects an organization’s vision and strategy with clear and measurable objectives.

One way of making progress on transformation objectives measurable is to express them as OKRs. (Objectives and Key Results). For example:

• Objective: Accelerate Time-to-Market:
  • Key Result: Deployment Frequency increased by 50%.
  • Key Result: Team delivery predictability > 80%
• Objective: Provide Customers with Highest Product Quality:
  • Key Result: Customer-reported defects reduced by 33%.
• Objective: Improve Resolution Time on Post-Release Defects:
  • Key Result: Customer-reported defect resolution time reduced by 25%
• Objective: Best in Industry Customer Experience:
  • Key Result: Reduce average support response time from 8 to 2 hours.
  • Key Result: Achieve Net Promoter Score (NPS) of  > 8.0.
  • Key Result: Customer Retention Rate (CRR) > 80%.
• Objective: Best Place to Work for Employees:
  • Key Result: eNPS Score > 8.0.

OKRs are typically defined (or re-defined) on a quarterly basis. These would be a primary input for teams planning their activities for the next quarter. The implementation plan for these objectives would be reflected in a team’s Transformation Backlog.

Coaches from the Agile Transformation Office will work with teams to confirm completion of KRs based on objective evidence – demos of actions taken, screenshots, and so on.

Setting Up a Measurement Framework

Effective transformation governance must include data-driven inspection and adaptation. Basic steps in setting up a measurement framework likely include the following:

• Define overall outcomes that are being pursued by the transformation.
• Define major objectives to achieve each outcome.
• Determine a way to measure progress on achieving objectives – OKRs and targets.
• Build the necessary instrumentation for data collection and reporting.
• Set up a system of reviews to evaluate progress towards the objectives.

A Transformation Backlog is an ordered list of everything needed to achieve the transformation goals. Transformation Backlog items represent specific actions to be taken to realize an objective. For example if we have an objective about acceleration delivery cycles then we might have a corresponding backlog item for implementing test automation. The general flow is as follows:

A Transformation Dashboard is the aggregation of all data needed for decision-making and making any necessary adjustments to stay on track.

A basic dashboard which could be built from spreadsheets or tools like PowerBI along the following lines. Don’t delay getting actionable data in front of stakeholders by spending time evaluating lots of tools – that can come later if necessary.

Organizations should start with something very basic and evolve from there to meet their specific needs.