Get a Better Grip on the Performance of Your Scrum Team

Scrum Framework is deceptively simple. It does not prescribe the processes, matrices or any other artifacts that you would expect a framework to define. In the view of this lack of prescriptive approach, as a manager, you have to invent your own artifacts if you are accountable for the performance of one or more Scrum teams.

As a manager having no direct involvement in the self organizing scrum team, you have a very few handles to get grip on the team performance and to get an early warning when your team’s performance sets in to slow decline.

As a manager, if you just see the performance of a single sprint then you are likely to miss the important early warning signs of the simmering issues in the project before they blow up and put you in trouble.

To solve this problem, we created a simple tool to capture the sprint performance data, which was much more than just the team velocity
Our tool was a simple spreadsheet to record the outcome of sprint on a set of parameters that really mattered.

We categorized these parameters as follows:

Sprint Result #

1. Sprint Goal Achieved (Yes/No)

Productivity #

1. No. of story points fully implemented in the sprint
2. Is the team productivity satisfactory for the PO? (Yes/No)

Sprint Backlog Quality #

1. General Quality of user stories (0-poor 5-excellent)
2. Availability of PO during the sprint (0-poor 5-excellent)

Communication #

1. Do stand-ups always start on time? (yes/no)
2. Do distributed teams hear and see each other without extra effort? (yes/no) : This is relevant for offshore projects.
3. Do people understand each other during distributed stand-up? (yes/no) : This is relevant for offshore projects.

Quality and Bugs #

1. Total number of open defects after the sprint completion.
2. Test Coverage (%)
3. Time required to fix the Technical Debt ( < 1 Sprint or > 1 Sprint)

Others #

1. Confidence in the successful delivery of next release ( 0-low 1-medium 2-high)
2. What training would team need to work more effectively? (Name the skills)
3. High Points of Sprint (List captured during retrospective)
4. Low Points of Sprint (List captured during retrospective)

Managerial Interventions #

1. Your interventions with the supposed effects. (Descriptive text)

We could also add more parameters that mattered the most to our organization or the client our team was working for. You should have a good shared definition of the subjective parameters.

Here is how you can use this tool.

First layout these parameters in a spreadsheet column or any other tool of your choice that gives you an Excel like row-column structure.

At the end of sprint retrospective, you should project this spreadsheet on the screen and fill the values for the last completed sprint. You should also write down the managerial interventions, you are planning to do in order to improve a parameter. Some interventions can take long time to yield results but it is important to record when you initiated the interventions and why, so that you can see across the series of sprints if you got the desired results. You need to keep information contained in this sheet transparent for everybody in the team.

As you collect the data over a series of sprints, your team will have much better visibility on your actions to continuously improve the team’s performance. This will build confidence in them that you are there to help them improve. You will be able to get early warning signals to intervene before things get out of control.