agileI work for a company that practices strict Scrum across all teams, not just the development team. Part of Scrum is having retrospectives that include a Kaizen– a thing the team can do that will increase happiness, and thus performance.
It’s easy to measure performance (velocity) in terms of ‘points planned vs. points completed’, but how are you tracking and measuring progress of all teams, including not-as-quantifiable data like Kaizen?
Actually, Kaizen is quantifiable in some ways. An interesting metric is whether some of the points raised during retros turn up over and over and over. Another is if a task seemingly never gets done properly and comes back with each sprint. Both are indicators that the team, the tasks’ owners, or the manager are not making as much progress as they should.
One of the companies I worked for, had used something like this to keep track of time and progress across different teams.
https://www.10000ft.com/
As a person who worked on a few corporations and teams, this seems like a pretty good software if it is used and enforced.
An agile organisation commits entirely on continuous improvements at all levels of the hierarchy. Some measures are outcome based, that is the success would be the result in the continuous delivery of high quality products and services, reduction in overspending budgets, feedback to show employees have developing better relations internally and externally. An increasing return on investment would be a key performance indicator, that could be reported on quarterly to track patterns and trends. Using a range of different indicators do not by any means need to be based upon the same units of measure to report metrics, defined by the nature of the indicator and availability of useful data. A performance dashboard or ‘balanced scorecard’ system would be the recommended visual presentation method to influence a CEO decision.
This is where business process engineering and change management programmes come into play. There are hundreds of examples of tools, techniques and approaches used during this particular phase of realignment and restructuring of teams and functions. By optimising the size of the workforce at an operational level, better tactical decisions must be made in order to retain valuable employees. People that become aware they are more valuable than before and find job satisfaction improving over time. The business delivers high quality products and services, with loyal workforce, difficult and important decisions need to be made, at a strategic level, therefore the organisation would soon find success through synergy, which is achieved by optimising processes, adding value to assets and resources, aligning services and achieving synergy by combining methods, tools, techniques and systems , in size and of course complexity, which is why tactics like Scrum, Lean and Kaizen’ are used to achieve better results. To answer your question, the simple answer is that, you could measure the successes by monitoring the strength of the correlation between indicative measures of performance trends.
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