This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
I gave my metrics talk yesterday, and something occurred to me: in traditional projects, we're used to measuring what's been done. In agile projects, we measure what's left to do. I just realized yesterday that the difference in how we measure makes a difference in how people feel about the project. The more you measure what's left, the more you can see the end of the iteration or the end of the project. It's also a lot clearer to see how many more iterations it will take if management decides to add more features.
I'll be modifying my measurements -- even for not-specifically-agile projects -- to reflect what's left to do, not what's done.
Just because "we're used to measuring what's been done" doesn't mean it was the right thing to do, "agile project" or not. It might have been appropriate to track what's been done for the purposes of progress payments in large, long-term projects, but for that purpose only. Share it with the accountants and the accountants only. For those actually doing the work, I've often said that "percent complete" is a useless concept/metric for managing the flow and speed of project delivery, and if the value of the project is in its completion, it's "what's left" that stands in the way of getting to it. So focus on it, with metrics and status processes.
(Hmmm... One of the best threads in memory on the subject of earned value is going on at the AgileProjectManagement Yahoo!Group recently. The concurrent combination of that conversation with this posting reminds me that one of the reasons I'm not enthralled with EV is that the basis of its system of metrics is what has been completed -- what has been "earned" -- while PM, for me, is about what remains to be done. How much work, how much uncertainty, and how much time remains is more important to keeping promises than the completion of pieces of work that add up only to an incomplete project.)
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