Written by Karen Powell, PMP, CSM

Are Carrots for Horses? Are metrics good motivators? Why use metrics?

As Matt Badgley from VersionOne explained in the February PMI Atlanta Agile Forum, the answers depend on your teams, the type of work being done, and the metrics you use. Per Matt, “Metrics are something that some to react with the proverbial angst. The reality is that everyone likes to know where they stand and good teams look for as many feedback mechanisms as they can to help them improve. Many people love metrics. Many cringe at metrics. Sometimes metrics drive really bad behaviors and cause bad results to happen.”

If all metrics aren’t created equal and some people like metrics while others don’t, how can your organization introduce metrics that will foster positive engagement, support your Agile team’s desire to continuously improve, and deliver the results you want?



What you need to know is metrics CAN motivate and add value when the right measures are used. Just be aware that sometimes carrots are for horses when it comes to metrics and motivation. For some types of work, such as manufacturing widgets, incentive compensation (the carrot) and metrics associated with tracking those work goals might produce terrific results; however, for knowledge work, the type of work often associated with Agile teams, the carrot could be chopped to pieces by the team and not effective at all. For knowledge workers, it is often the informative metrics such as burn down charts, burn up charts and velocity charts that tell a story for the team and lead to questions and discussions that assist them with inspecting what they are doing so they can auto correct and improve future products.

There are many measures that can effectively be used to present the data we need to continuously improve and motivate teams. Some are quantitative and some are qualitative. Some are predictive and are lagging indicators of health or success. The trick is to find the best ones.

So what do teams want and what metrics should be used? As noted by Daniel Pink in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and his animated video on YouTube: What motivates people?, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction---at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better for ourselves and our world. Our teams desire autonomy, mastery and purpose. How do we provide this? We ask them to participate in defining the measures!

Metrics are important, but improperly implemented metrics can lead to broken trust, teams playing the numbers game, giving up or just walking away, and saying they don’t care anymore.

Since teams desire autonomy, mastery and purpose, Matt recommends that we give the team the vision + rules + guardrails and we trust them to come up with the best measures for defining the success for what they do. He suggests that we follow the steps below for success:

    1. Attach a goal to metrics – don’t have a metric if there’s not a reason to have it.
         a. Let someone define the goal and have the team come in behind them and decide how they will measure it.
    2. Keep it visual – visual charts drive questions.
         a. Numbers drive reactions (example instead of stating 50% complete, use a burn down/up chart to drive inspection and discussion)
    3. Focus on the team not the project or program level – Keep your measures at the team level and not the project level so that the team has information that drives questions.
    4. Keep the cost low – use canned data, choose your increment wisely, discuss value vs. cost, repurpose existing metrics, and automate, automate, automate!
    5. If they are rotten, throw them out – if it’s run its course, don’t use it.
    6. Make metrics fun!
         a. Show progress in fun ways
         b. Flair– reward with flair such as buttons
         c. Promote engagement – create a happiness board
         d. Maintain an engaging workplace that people want to be at and produce quality and innovative products. This helps people to act quickly as a team.
    7. Make it transparent.

In the end, it might be true that carrots are for horses and we need to treat people like people. So what will you do?


Matt Badgley, Agile Coach
With a career in Information Technology that has officially reached drinking age, Matt has wore one too many hats in roles from Systems Analyst to Programmer to IT Manager to Programmer to Director. He’s a seeker of new ideas and learning new things. Matt's passion has been working with product delivery teams to develop into their own identity and simply build valuable solutions by making great software. At the end of the day, Matt believes in integrity, hard work, trial-and-error, people, and faith.

You can learn more about Matt at http://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbadgley or read his blog at http://agilebacon.com or connect with him via Twitter, his handle is @agilebaconbeer.

Thank you to our sponsors for this month, Matrix Resources for providing our meeting facility and VersionOne for sponsoring food and our speaker.


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