How well are we served by our current metrics? Do metrics such as developer and tester productivity, ROI, and on-time / on-budget help us improve results? Or, do such metrics drive us towards negative behaviors? In this workshop, we describe the foundation for meaningful metrics. Workshop participants, via a series of exercises, translate this foundation into metrics that they can immediately use. This workshop results from the response I received during my Agile 2008 presentation on the CIO and agile teams. There was a great deal of interest on the topic of aligned, meaningful metrics.

By now, your company has made the transition to Agile. “Sprints”, “backlogs”, and “retrospectives” are everyday words, but you’re also discovering the serious challenges that software agility brings to product management. The Product Owners, who have been scattered across multiple teams, are not cohesively aligned around the same prioritized set of corporate initiatives and strategies. In addition, there are cross-product dependencies that are not being effectively recognized and addressed. My company’s solution was to build a single, enterprise level, Unified Backlog.