“We as a team know how things are going! We have a good view of what we’ve achieved and what we haven’t, and if we also collect metrics now, it all takes away from our working time for important features. We don’t really see what it brings us. It’s best if we get this in a nice dashboard and are not burdened with the survey in the first place.”
Quelle: Too many Teams…
One of these sentences, or sometimes all of them, are often used when we talk to teams about metrics. Occasionally, the meaning is clear, but the starting point is missing and the whole topic ends up somewhere at the bottom of the priority list. One of those “we should really do that now” issues. If only the project wasn’t so pressing.
Roger Federer
Let’s start with a little quiz.
From 1999 to 2002, tennis player Roger Federer made it from the top 1000 to the top 10 list of men’s tennis. How many weeks in the following 19 years (until 2021) was Federer NOT in the top 10?
And we’ll leave you with another question:
How long do you think he was without a coach during this time?
*littleMomentWithElevatorMusic…..
The answer to the first question: 12 weeks
The answer to the second question: There were short periods in 2004, 2008 and 2009.
Did you guess correctly? 12 weeks in 19 years is an honest word, isn’t it? Roger Federer is rightly one of the best players of all time. (By the way, you can find an article about his “fall” from the top 10 here. After a career like that, it just hurts and pains everywhere at some point).
Here you can find an overview of his rankings over the years:
What about the second question? Were you able to guess correctly here? That’s really surprising at first, isn’t it? After all, we can all agree that Roger Federer knows how to hold a tennis racket and get a clean topspin over the net.
So why does he need a coach? Federer relied on Ivan Ljubicic as his coach for many years. He is also only two years older than Federer. Why do we mention that? There is always the stereotype that coaches are old and players are young. This is due to our socialization of a parent-child relationship. But that’s exactly what we want to make clear.
By the way: Federer is not an isolated case. This phenomenon (age and coach despite top performance) can be seen thousands of times; of course also in team sports! (Or does anyone doubt that the Real Madrid team doesn’t know how to kick a ball?)
Internal and external control loops
Good agile teams (as well as athletes, sports teams and orchestras) know the importance of the inner and outer control loop. This model originates from sports science and describes, for example, the perception of movement sequences.
The athlete has an inner circle in which their own perception is compared with the demand and with how they “know” and “do” it. For example, how do you hold the club head? How do you move in the long jump, how do you perceive a game situation and go into the transition game, etc.?
In addition, there is a trainer who operates the outer control loop. How was the club head held from the coach’s perspective? How was the positional play? Were there perception errors in the inner control loop? Successful athletes and teams have coordinated these control loops and brought them into balance.
For this reason, it is also important to rely on metrics. They help to back up these control loops with data. In agile, the role of coach is often performed by a scrum master or an internal/external coach. The belief that teams are already functioning well and the internal control loop is sufficient can end fatally. High-performance teams rely on this system as they are aware of potential perception errors and actively overcome them.
Agile teams should start introducing metrics as support at an early stage. This is not about the “KPI set”. In other words, it’s not about the question “What do we need to achieve for our boss to say we’ve done a good job?” It’s about asking yourself: “What metrics do we want to collect in order to improve as a team? Where do we have potential perception errors? Where should we collect metrics because an objective statement on this could significantly change the way we work?
The set of metrics will and should change over time. However, there should always be one available to help you make better decisions. If you want to delve a little deeper into sports science, you can find a more detailed description of the model here (according to Meinel/Schnabel, by the way).
Retrospecives
There is one thing we don’t want to leave unsaid at this point. Perhaps you and your team are involved in Scrum and you will certainly be aware that retrospectives are an essential event. It is not uncommon for teams to experience a certain amount of frustration with the retrospective. The whole thing always feels like group therapy where the coach is too small.
Scrum Master says: “The Vegas rule applies. Everything that is said here in the retro stays in the retro”. This is an attempt to build a safe space. This is followed by a request to say where the shoe pinches. The expectation is that everyone will now jump down each other’s throats under the protection of Vegas to finally get everything out on the table. And if there is nothing? “Do we need the retro? – No, not really in this sprint”
Sounds familiar? Now imagine you have metrics. You have an external control loop that draws your attention to things and motivates you to jump even further? Even more story points, even less waste, even more accurate estimation… whatever. Solving that is another topic. The fact is: metrics give you a lever that lifts retro out of the grubby corner of group psychiatry. They make you want to try things out and see what effect it has on the metrics.
“Great tip Nerd Republic!”
Yes – that’s why you’re here 😉
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