If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it - scrum measures

Today, I want to tell you about one of the thinks which is very helpful, but missing on a lot of implementations of scrum.

"If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it"

I heard this sentence on the conference in the other context. I think it fit to the Scrum. How you measure that you are better than half year ago? Do you feel a scrum spirit? Yes, we measure our story points, but I think this is a very bad measure, because if you have a small project you can do something fast, but the situation is opposite when you have a big project. The same functionality you can do with more problems, so your productivity is always lower and lower. The result is you are always worst.

We need know what we want to improve and what is our problem. If you want to define it, you need to have a measure. What does mean bad? What does mean good? These are a good, but hard questions.

What and how we can measure on Scrum?

I want to say these are everything. I have some examples for explaining why:

• We can measure the customer satisfaction,
• We can measure the team satisfaction,
• We can measure the team speed,
• We can measure the bugs,
• We can measure the problems,
• We can measure the conflicts
• A lot of things...

It sound beautiful right? But how can I measure it?

I have one solution. Don't think about measure like a scale from bad to very good or numeric. We can use descriptive assessment. If we have it, we can compare current assessment with assessment from half years ago.

Why all this?

Ok, I say we need it, but don't explain why? I have a few arguments for that.

First is that when we want create a measure we need a data. This data will be feedback, story points, discussions, actions, everything. During collecting it, we can get a knowledge about something which we don't know that exists. For example, during getting a customer satisfaction feedback, we can get any information about they don't understand what we talk to them. We don't know about it, because we think this is easy to understand, but does anyone ask about it our customers? I think no, but we don't need to ask always. I think if we always get a very positive information we don't need to ask about it. Sometimes maybe for a control measure.

Second is that when we have a measure we can put us on it. We get a knowledge about how progress we do from the beginning, where we are now and the major argument where we want to be. This is very helpful for defining our goals and create a plan, like I mentioned in my older post. This is easier to control and manage. We can do action for achieving the goal.

The last is we have documented that we are improving. We can be proud or disappointed. I think this is a very good psychological trick to motivate us and I want to use it to me.