Three Essential Leadership Practices that Improve Team Ownership - Practice 3

Written by Pollyanna Pixton,

Practice 3: Apply Meaningful Metrics

People do what they are measured by. If you ask people to come to work at 8 and go home at 5, do you get eight hours of productivity? Focus on results. Ask the team to decide how they want to measure project, sprint and release success using the following guidelines for their metrics:

Focus on measuring results (versus activities) toward meeting business goals.

Keep few in number—otherwise, the sheer volume of metrics makes them meaningless.

Be sure they motivate the right behaviors rather than being something used as a weapon against others. Too often we impose metrics to punish wrong behaviors rather than inspire improved performance.

Design metrics to measure processes, not people. Meaningful metrics help us identify when processes, not people, need to be fixed. Keep them simple to measure and simple to understand.

Make sure they are quantifiable. If the team members decide they want to decrease technical debt, ask them, “By how much?” and how they will measure their progress and success. At the end of every planning meeting, ask the team how they will hold each other accountable.

Successful leaders know how to transfer ownership to team members. They recognize that people support what they create. Allowing teams to come up with their own answers, prioritize their work based on business value and create their own results-based metrics are essential practices in the agile world.