Hi,
what is the best way to measure teams performance in scaled agile?
What metrics or KPIs on the program level?
Please share your experience
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Why do you want to measure a team’s performance in SAFe?
Why do you think SAFe does not explicitly point to a team performance measure?
SAFe leans (ha! pun intended) quite heavily on the ideas of W Edward Deming.
His 14 points for management from “Out of the Crisis!” are highly valid.
Here’s some of those 14 points (from this link : https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/)
“10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
11a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.
11b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.”
So – perhaps worry less about KPIs, metrics and performance targets and more about growing leadership at all levels within the organisation?
The empirical evidence for this comes from the DevOps movement, as stated in the book “Accelerate! The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations” by Forsgren, Humble and Kim.
They
(a) provide 4 metrics (the DORA metrics) at the organisational (ie ART) level that correlate with high performance, and
(b) point to Ron Westrum’s notion of a “generative” culture, in which
– teams own performance, and raise the bar al the time
– the team’s job is to identify systemic problems across the organisation
– management’s job is to address those systemic issues
– this is done in respectful partnership
TLDR; The evidence suggests that individual and team level OKRs and performance metrics are worse-than-useless, in that they degrade organisational performance. Organisation-scale metrics that teams and leadership collaborate to address are better. Read “Accelerate!” and “Out of the Crisis!”
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