Skip to main content
Search Icon
Quick Links
  • Adobe Completes Workfront Acquisition
  • Workfront + Adobe
  • Why Workfront is different
  • Leap Virtual Conference
  • Interactive Product Tour
  • Work Management Guide
Language Select Icon
US (English) UK (English) Dutch German Swedish
Login
Workfront ProofHQ
Contact Sales
Language Select Icon
US (English) UK (English) Dutch German Swedish
Workfront - An Adobe Company logo
Search Icon
Quick Links
  • Adobe Completes Workfront Acquisition
  • Workfront + Adobe
  • Why Workfront is different
  • Leap Virtual Conference
  • Interactive Product Tour
  • Work Management Guide
  • Why Workfront
  • Solutions
  • Platform
  • Plans
  • Resources
Why Workfront
Overview

Why We Are Different

Customers

Partners

Services

Solutions
By Department

Marketing

IT

Product Development

Professional Services

Agency

By Use Case

Project Management

Resource Management

Digital Collaboration

Portfolio Planning

Strategic Planning

Platform
By Product

Workfront

  • Goals

  • Scenario Planner

  • Fusion

Adobe Experience Cloud

Tours & Demos

Interactive Product Tour

Scenario Planner Demo

Workfront Goals

Plans
Resources
Learn

Resource Center

Work Management Guide

Blog

Events

Customers

Workfront One

Training

Innovation Lab

Workfront System Status

Login
Workfront ProofHQ
Contact Sales

Overview

Why We Are Different

See what makes us stand out from the competition and why top brands trust us.

Customers

Learn how Workfront customers benefit from our work management solution.

Partners

Consult our extensive global partner network of digital transformation experts.

Services

Get comprehensive support, training, and a tailored implementation of Workfront.

Recommended Content

Workfront Overview

With Workfront, enterprise work management can help your company, departments plan, predict, collaborate, evolve, and deliver their best work.

Learn more
Why workfront product screen.
Learn more

By Department

Marketing

Align marketing strategy to execution and launch campaigns faster.

IT

Transform the enterprise and deliver impact with data-driven decisions.

Product Development

Manage processes and automate work to launch winning products.

Professional Services

Manage client needs and deliver services faster.

Agency

Streamline workflows, manage resources, and deliver results.

Explore all solutions

By Use Case

Project Management

Plan projects, track progress, and deliver work that achieves results.

Resource Management

View capacity, make assignments, and prove your impact.

Digital Collaboration

Centralize communication, project planning, and work execution.

Portfolio Planning

Decide which projects to prioritize or pause, and identify those at risk.

Strategic Planning

Define business direction and outline a path for achieving your goals.

Explore all use cases

Recommended Content

Mighty Guide: 7 Experts on Flawless Campaign Execution

Read this Mighty Guide for advice from seven marketing experts on how to execute flawless campaigns under pressure.

Learn more
grey background with mighty guide logo
Learn more

By Product

Workfront

Manage the entire lifecycle of work in a single, centralized solution.

  • Goals

    Align strategic goals to work, monitor progress, and drive amazing results.

  • Scenario Planner

    Plan continuously, compare scenarios, and determine the best path forward.

  • Fusion

    Integrate your favorite applications and automate work in one platform.

Adobe Experience Cloud

Digital experience solutions

Explore the platform

Tours & Demos

Interactive Product Tour

Get a hands-on look at managing all your work in Workfront.

Scenario Planner Demo

Experience how Scenario Planner simplifies the continuous planning process.

Workfront Goals

Align strategic goals to work, monitor progress, and drive amazing results.

Explore all tours & demos

Recommended Content

Forrester Total Economic Impact of Workfront Study

Forrester interviewed Workfront customers in marketing, IT program management, product development, and the strategic programs office, concluding that Workfront can provide companies with a 285% ROI over three years with a payback period of less than three months.

Learn more
Forrester report
Learn more

Learn

Resource Center

View webinars, reports, and studies to learn about the Workfront solution.

Work Management Guide

Learn everything you need to know about enterprise work management.

Blog

Prepare for the future of work with insights from work management leaders.

Events

Join Workfront at one of these events.

Customers

Workfront One

Get product updates, connect with other users, and request product support.

Training

Become a Workfront expert with our library of training resources.

Innovation Lab

Submit and vote on product ideas.

Workfront System Status

Check on Workfront status, scheduled maintenance, and incidents.

Recommended Content

Level Up: How to Plan, Measure & Execute Strategic Growth Initiatives

Ready to learn how to take advantage of new solutions to level up your strategic alignment in 2021? Join LeapPoint’s leadership, Workfront experts and special guests from Penn State University as they share best practices, tools and ideas to level-up your strategic alignment and execution for 2021.

Learn more
Work Boldly
Learn more

Agile Metrics

Do we leave behind concerns about accountability and ROI when we embrace continuous flow or iterative delivery? Agile metrics give us insight into how the process is working so we can clearly see areas for improvement and intervene before small hiccups become major roadblocks. Agile teams concern themselves not just with the results of what they deliver, but also the way in which it was delivered.

Agile metrics planning
Agile Metrics

Agile KPIs and ROI

Before we jump into exploring Agile metrics to measure teams specifically, it’s important to remind ourselves that Agile projects are still beholden to good old fashioned measurements of success too.

Business metrics, KPIs (key project indicators), and basic proof of return on investment (ROI) still matter in an Agile environment, so we have to keep an eye on those metrics as well as our Agile metrics. These data points are particularly important during an Agile pilot, when you’re looking to prove the impact of a serious change, namely the switch to managing work using the Agile methodology.

If you haven’t previously been tracking basic performance metrics for your team, it’s going to be tough to quantify the effects of an Agile implementation. So even before you choose the right Agile metrics, make sure you’ve laid the foundation for measuring your marketing.

Five Agile metrics worth measuring

Now that we’ve covered the basics, it’s time to get into metrics for Agile teams. We’re going to cover five different options, most of which will apply to just about any kind of team. For those that are best suited to one particular methodology, we’ll be sure to note that during the explanation.

When choosing which of these Agile metrics to track, remember that it’s difficult to optimize something you don’t measure. But you also don’t want to waste hours of time on pulling numbers. Consider what you’ll do with the data you collect, and whether your current tool set provides you easy access to the information you’re after. If you don’t plan to act on your metric, or it’s complicated to collect, you may want to try another.

Agile velocity

Agile velocity simply measures the amount of work that a team completes during a set amount of time, usually a sprint or iteration. It’s usually gauged in points, which means it requires the team to size each piece of work that they put into their sprint backlog.

Any Agile team that uses timeboxed iterations can measure their velocity. This means both Scrum and Scrumban teams can easily make use of this Agile metric, while it doesn’t often work very well in a Kanban implementation.

At its core, the goal of measuring velocity is to see whether the team is improving over time, but it can be misused. If velocity becomes a bludgeon with which to beat the team, they’re likely to start gaming their estimations so they appear to be doing more even if they aren’t. Make sure velocity is simply a health check for the team, not an unreasonable expectation.

agile velocity chart

As you track velocity, look for any erratic moments. If these become the norm rather than the exception, help the team investigate the root cause. Some possible retrospective questions might include:

  • Are there unforeseen challenges we didn't account for when estimating this work? 

  • How can we better break down work to uncover some of these challenges?

  • Is there outside business pressure pushing the team beyond its limits? 

  • Is adherence to best practices suffering as a result?

  • As a team, are we overzealous in forecasting for the sprint?

Burndown chart

Velocity is a trailing indicator—it won’t give you any data about an iteration until it’s already over. A burndown chart, on the other hand, gives you day-to-day data about how the team is doing throughout the sprint.

Like velocity, an effective burndown chart requires estimation of the projects being used.

burndown chart example

Here the team has committed to 160 points, and as time goes on and they complete some of their work, the chart “burns down” until the sprint is over. At that point they’ll hopefully have zero work remaining and the vertical bars will have disappeared.

Burndown charts are highly useful on young Agile teams who need some guidance on how much they can really get done within each sprint. They can tell us if:

  • The team isn’t committing to enough work because their burndown chart “burns down” early sprint after sprint.

  • The team is committing to too much because they have multiple points left on their chart at the end of each sprint.

  • The team isn’t breaking work down into small enough pieces because the burndown line makes steep jumps rather than a gradual decline.

  • External interruptions are derailing the team because the vertical line representing points goes up mid-sprint as new work gets added.

Once a team stabilizes and delivers a steady amount of work the burndown chart may become less useful. Of course, it’s hard to get these kinds of metrics retroactively, so keeping them on the radar can help surface problems before they get out of hand.


Whitepaper: How to Become an Agile Agency

Datasheet: The Agile Marketing Cheat Sheet


Quarterly/strategic burndown chart

Burndown charts provide insight into how things are going during a particular iteration, but we also need to make sure we’re incrementally moving towards bigger goals.

On a traditional Agile software team, this trajectory could be tracked via an epic or release burndown chart. On an Agile marketing team, they prefer to call it a strategic or quarterly burndown chart. This is a longer term look at what the team is doing and how it’s related to the strategy over time.

quarterly or strategic burndown chart

Image source: Atlassian.com.

You can see in the chart above that a few new items have been added to the team’s larger backlog after each sprint. While we wouldn’t allow that to happen to a sprint backlog in the middle of an iteration, it’s completely acceptable in this context.

Over time managers and leaders may decide to add or remove some items based on what they learn, or based on changing organizational objectives. As that happens the strategic burndown keeps everyone aware of “the ebb and flow of work” within the long term strategy.

Monitoring the strategic burndown chart can give you insight into whether the team’s work is actively contributing to larger goals, or if they’re just churning through busy work.

Red flags to watch for on this chart include:

  • Strategic forecasts aren't updated as the team delivers work

  • No change is visible after several iterations

  • Chronic scope creep, which may be a sign that leaders don’t fully understand the problem the Agile team is trying to solve

  • Strategic scope grows faster than the team can absorb it, meaning they’ll never be able to complete a strategic goal

Cycle time

So far our Agile metrics have been mostly concerned with work at the team level, but we may also want to know more about how long it takes the team to finish smaller projects. Cycle time can deliver this insight

Cycle time simply measures how long it takes something to get done from start to finish. Joel Bancroft-Connors of AgileConnection calls it “hands on keyboard time.”

Measuring cycle time is best done automatically via your Agile software or tool of choice, but even measuring manually alongside a physical task board or Kanban board will give you useful data.

Just keep track of how long a project/task/story takes to get into your “done” column once it’s pulled from the backlog. The average for all your work is your cycle time.

It’s measured at the level of a user story (or a task or project, depending on how you structure your Agile board), so it’s a much more granular metric than anything we’d see on a burndown chart.

Cycle time also gets us much more immediate feedback, because we can see the results of any changes right away. When we adjust the system, cycle time will either increase or decrease right away, so we know if the experiment succeeded or failed in a short time. Our goal is cycle time that’s both consistent and short, regardless of the kind of work being done.

Consistent cycle time means we can accurately predict when we’ll be able to deliver individual pieces of work, whether we’re using continuous flow or sprint-like timeboxes to handle larger projects.

Agile team happiness

Our final Agile metric isn’t strictly related to the Agile process at all. Instead, it’s a look at the team’s happiness.

There’s no need for any fancy tracking system here. Just start your retrospectives by asking each member of the Agile team to score their happiness on whatever scale you choose. Then keep track of the average from one retrospective to the next.

Happy teams create better work, which will deliver more satisfied customers, so this is in fact an important business metric. But it’s also important to recognize that if all your Agile process metrics are perfect but the team is deeply unhappy, you’re headed for some trouble. The team may be masking its issues while maintaining high performance, meaning burnout and high turnover could be on the horizon.

New team members invariably disrupt an Agile team, so we want to keep people happy and the team configuration stable whenever possible.


Whitepaper: Agile Marketing for Creative Teams

Webinar: What's Keeping Marketers From Going Agile?


How long to track Agile metrics

You may decide to track one or all of the metrics we’ve discussed so far, but whatever combination you select make sure you get more than a brief snapshot. Track metrics for at least six months to identify larger trends.

That doesn’t mean you can’t take any action on your findings until six months have passed (that wouldn’t be very Agile). But this ongoing look at different data points can help you see how one impacts the others.

Agile metric pitfalls to avoid

Before you start measuring Agile metrics, consider doing the following:

  • Keep Agile metrics within teams. Neither teams nor managers should compare metrics across teams, and that goes for everything from velocity to happiness. These metrics are for individual teams only.

  • Measure, don’t target. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The goal of Agile metrics is to spot and understand trends, not to create magic numbers the team tries to hit at all costs.
Download now

The Advanced Guide to Agile

This Ebook is written for managers who are familiar with Agile terminology, have successfully run sprints or a Kanban structure with their team, and are ready to dig a little deeper into Agile and its potential benefits.

Download the Advanced Guide to Agile to learn:

  • The nuances of the Agile mindset
  • What it means to be truly Agile
  • How to manage Agile projects
  • All about Kanban as an alternative to Scrum
Why Workfront
  • Plans
Solutions
  • Marketing
  • IT
  • Agencies
  • Professional Services
  • Product Development
Products
  • Product Tours
  • Workfront
  • Workfront Fusion
  • Integrations
Resource Center
  • The New World of Work
  • Blog
  • Work Management Guides
  • News & Press
  • Events
Support
  • System Status
  • Help
  • Workfront One
  • Innovation Lab
  • Training
About Us
  • Leadership
  • Careers
  • Partners
  • News & Press
  • Locations
  • Security
Adobe logo
  • Careers
  • Privacy Notice
  • Security
  • Terms of Service
  • Cookie Policy
  • Resources Index
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
YouTube
Instagram
Contact Us
Copyright © 2021 Workfront, Inc. All Rights Reserved.