With all these promises, companies expect to see measurable results to justify transferring the company over to Agile. Using key performance indicators or KPIs, these different techniques are used to measure a company’s success.

To see success and increase improvement, you need to measure and evaluate the current work that a company is doing. Using quantitative and qualitative components, your company can track the current process and compare it to your company’s end goal.

Here we will give an overview of the key performance indicators that best measure the project management process and your company’s value. These are ten ways to quantify the progress of your company and which areas to look at to find measurable results.

Work Velocity

To calculate the velocity of your workflow, you want to look at how much work is being done within a certain amount of time. For example, each unit of work can be looked at in terms of the number of hours worked or how many goals or user stories are achieved. Then you can calculate these units depending on the number of weeks or within each sprint. 

For example, you can measure team velocity by seeing how many hours were worked within two weeks. This indicator is a quantitative and precise measurement tool that can be compared along the process.

The Capacity of the Team

Another KPI used is to look at your team’s capacity and how much work can be done. Team capacity is calculated by multiplying the total number of members in a given team by the number of hours during working days. So, for example, a team’s capacity is the number of members, times number of hours a day, times number of working days to give you a total number of productive hours.

So, the resulting hours will provide a measurable number indicating the team’s capacity for the project. The team capacity is an indicator of how much work can be produced by all the team members.

Backlog Growth

In Agile, a backlog is a list of all the completed deliverables along the project process. It is generally set out at the onset of a project and is reviewed and edited along the way.

The backlog can track how many pieces of work have been completed and monitor the growth of this list. A growing list of deliverables will indicate increased productivity, more usable products, and an increase in your company’s ROI. 

Epic Burndown Rate

The burndown rate charts how quickly your team is moving through the list of user stories and can complete each goal in a given sprint. On a burndown chart, the velocity of work is compared to the effort put into each sprint. 

The end Epic Burndown report will show you how all the team members progress through a given Epic or body of work. This report will display how a team advanced over multiple sprints of a project, and you can track how many sprints it takes for a team to complete an Epic of work. This rate reveals how quickly a team is working and can be compared with previous to previous sprints to show improvements.

Defect Resolution Rates

The amount of error throughout the production should significantly decrease with an Agile approach, though some amount of error may still occur. The key difference here is that small errors can be noticed, reviewed, and resolved efficiently.

The defect resolution rate shows the speed at which the team resolves an error. A shorter amount of time will mean that a defect was quickly noticed and fixed. When a problem is resolved quickly, the team can then move on to other parts of the project and continue to achieve the next goal.

Daily Stand Up Meetings

Using the Agile methodology provides daily stand-up meetings for members to give an overview of the work they have achieved and gain feedback on where they are at. In addition, these meetings provide the project team an opportunity to talk about the progress of the project goal. This feedback is a good indicator of where the said goal is in the sprint cycle and how well team members reach their Epic. 

Having frequent but short daily stand-up meetings allows each member to reflect on their personal contribution to the current workload and lends insight into how the team is performing during this sprint. Over scheduling can lead to burnout, though, and having more meetings often does not lead to more productivity. Therefore, ensure your daily stand-up remains efficient and directed so as not to waste time.

Retrospectives

The nature of Agile is to have an iterative development of a product, so the large scope is broken down into more focused parts. In doing so, each Epic of the project can be reviewed separately and consistently. The team can look back and reflect on the work that has been done at the end of every sprint so that they can improve for the following item on the list. 

An Agile retrospective is a practice whereby team members consistently look at the last work period, the pros and the cons, and how best to improve for the following sprint.

Testing During a Sprint

Another measurable test that should be performed is to test the product feature at the end of each sprint. Testers should use and review the modified feature produced by the team and see if it is working effectively.

Ultimately, you want to test the product that is delivered at the end of each sprint to measure whether the product is working correctly. Also, the latest feature works well with previous products delivered in other sprints. 

The end goal is to create a cohesive and complete program that works. And so, testing along the way will help in coming up with the entire working project. 

Deliverables at the End of Each Sprint

The deliverables are classified as the actual physical product that has been tested and handed over to customers. This is delivered or revealed at the end of a sprint, and although it is a portion of the overall program goal, it is still a usable piece of software or portion of the program.

Looking at what the deliverables are and how many are completed at the end of a sprint is another way to measure the performance of the company and the Agile process.

These key performance indicators used in an Agile approach will help measure the amount and the quality of the work being done. Using these KPIs will help build direction for your company and are used to evaluate the overall achievements of following the agile methodology.

These are components that follow the strict methodology of Agile and will help determine its effectiveness. Quantifying progress with these KPIs can also give you an idea of future direction from any possible adjustments you make during this evaluation process.

In addition to following the method of Agile, an effective company should also adopt an agile way of thinking and work along the project management process. So, a few other factors should be looked at when analyzing company performance.

Other Indicators to Acknowledge

“Being Agile ” not only includes the specific process of teamwork but also focuses on how a company and its members should be. An agile company moves easily and quickly and adapts to changes collectively as a team. And so, looking at the behaviors of a team will also help determine if a company is really being agile.

Focus, for example, on customer collaboration and sharing knowledge and notice whether these components stand out in team meetings. Review whether or not there is trust within the company, members, and its stakeholders.

In addition, emphasis should be made on the engagement between different teams and how well they interact and respond to each other. Finally, you can use feedback forms and observation to get a good sense of what is going on among your teams.

If you want to promote an Agile company, in addition to these KPIs, you want to pay attention to your team and its members. The team should be working together to share knowledge and provide support to other members. There should be a team atmosphere built on trust, collaboration, and collective improvement

Then, of course, to measure the company’s progress, you can look at the final outcomes. Look at the innovation and growth of your company and compare costs and ROIs.