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Performance Management for Agile/LEAN organizations

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Written by CMC Media Staff   
Tuesday, 01 February 2011 01:00
   Going Mainstream With Agile - February  2011

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“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”

-  Albert Einstein

If you do not know where you are it is very difficult to get to where you want to go. We should measure the things that matter and refrain from measuring things that don't matter.

There is a very fine line understanding the difference between management-driven-metrics and metrics-driven-management. Being able to discern the difference and then understand the consequences of choosing one over the other is of paramount importance to your adoption of agile-lean product development.

This having been said the use of measurements and metrics seems like a straight forward distinction but deserves some discussion. One needs to understand the difference between a measure and a metric before using them to evaluate your adoption of agile-lean product development and delivery.

Additionally, there are many items that could be measured:

  • The Individual
  • Team
  • Enterprise
  • Customer Satisfaction
  • Business Value Delivered
  • Process
  • Product

This being the case the topic for this month’s edition of the Agile Journal is “Performance Management for Agile-Lean Organizations”.

In my article, How Does One Measure Agile-Lean Product Development Progress or Results, I discuss the difference between a measure and a metric and present measures and metrics to use to evaluate your adoption of agile-lean product development and delivery.

Alan Atlas in his article, Performance Management for Agile People, presents a few ideas on how to try to make the typical appraisal system work slightly better for Agile teams.

Anupam Kundu in his article, A Tale of Two Product Owners, cleverly tells us a story about you can get the code right, you can get the products right, but you need to get the culture right first. If you don't get the culture right then your company’s adoption of agile product development won't scale.

Bob Aiello in his article, Agile/Lean Performance, takes a look at why Agile results in better performance and how you can use this information to achieve success in your own technology efforts.

Leslie Sachs, in her article, Performance Factory for Agile/LEAN Organizations, discusses why Agile and Lean organizations are ideally positioned to help their members achieve excellence in performance with all of the successful results that we have come to expect from the transformation to becoming Agile.

Ronica Roth in her article, Making Multi-Team Agile Programs Successful, begins to address the many folks who have burning questions about how to manage multi-team programs with Agile.

Take care.
Your agile buddy and editor,
Russell Pannone
Editor
Agile Journal
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 01 February 2011 15:52
 
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