With my current focus on #flowefficiency where I work, I thought it was a good time to share how we are ensuring we focus on leading indicators instead of lagging ones. Having collecting 2.5 years of metrics during our Agile journey so far, its sometimes tricky to measure the right thing. What you measure tends to drive unwanted behaviour.
I think of a lagging indicator as something that has already happened. For example how many stories did a team complete, how many teams completed all committed stories, what is a teams current Flow Efficiency score? These metrics are useful, but don't necessarily lead me to my desired outcome. They just tell me what the current state is.
A leading indicator leads me towards the outcome we want to achieve. I think of it as the impact or behaviour change we need to see to achieve the outcome. When you think of it in these terms you need to think about how to measure the changed behaviour. For example, to improve the flow efficiency score I need teams to start performing experiments to remove waste in their system. So my leading indicator, and the thing I actually want to measure is how many waste removal experiments did the team perform this month/quarter. This behaviour change will lead to an outcome. For example, if a team has zero experiments, that's a pretty good indicator that their flow efficiency score will not be changing anytime time soon.
Make sure when you are collecting Agile Metrics for your teams that you choose the right thing to measure that will drive the right behaviour change.
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