Agile Notes (No. 69)

4 Key Flow Metrics and How to Use Them in Scrum Events

I recently finished The Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide by Stefan Wolpers. This is an excellent reference source to consult when your project isn’t flowing as well as it should.

This is a must-have resource for Scrum Masters and Product Owners. The “Toolbox” section in the Appendix could have been a book on its own. Don’t balk at the price. Get this book!

One of the things I want to focus on are the footnotes. Wolpers leaves a lot of tasty nuggets in the fine print. Let’s start with Yuval Yeret’s “4 Key Flow Metrics and How to Use Them in Scrum Events.” The flow metrics are:

• WIP

• Cycle Time

• Throughput

• Work Item Age

In the article, Yeret introduces a new metric, Work Item Age. He writes:

Work Item Age complements Cycle Time. If Cycle Time is a lagging indicator only relevant for finished items, Work Item Age is a leading indicator only relevant for non-finished items. The basic idea is to provide transparency to which items are flowing well and which are sort of "stuck" even if not formally blocked.

To me, this is an old contact center metric - Aging of “tickets.” You have a Service Level Agreement - Yeret calls it a Service Level Expectation. Same difference. You compare average age of a card/story/ticket to your SLA/SLE. At a glance, you can see when they are starting to “age” or lag in your queue.

In this article, Yeret also shows how to use each of the 4 Flow Metrics in each of your ceremonies:

That is a super-handy matrix. I like the idea of using WIP and WIA to inform and guide your scrum or kanban team. Item A is starting to lag a little. Are we ok? Are we stuck? Do we need help in any way?

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