Continuous Improvement by the numbers, & the culture

A case study in repeatable use of Team Metrics for continuous improvement at Scale

Team metrics are in vogue. There are a plethora of companies offering tools to support our agile practices and there is no shortage of books espousing the value of various combinations of metrics that will lead your team(s) to delivery stardom. Skyscanner would like to share our journey from realising this would enhance our competitive advantage to deploying not just a tool but changing our engineering management culture to being one that valued and utilised these metrics to drive greater improvement at scale. We will share what originally took us down this path including the signs that change was needed.

We will explain how our understanding of what we needed evolved throughout the exploration process and how we ran trials with teams to understand this better. We will share our interpretation of the most important metrics, the sources we were inspired by and how we expected to need to augment them. We will talk about the challenges we discovered with adoption, those we predicted and how we altered our plans to adapt to them. We will look at the values we created to assess the various tool providers to find one that we felt would enable our team and more importantly reinforce the cultural change that was the fundamental goal of this exercise. At the time of writing Skyscanner is guiding 80 squads (~600 engineers) through this change, we are seeing good levels of adoption and insights being acted on, having created cross-organisation communities of practice to support this change and bed it in for the long term. We will talk about the principles we have used to drive this adoption.

Participants will be able to:

• Gain insight into the benefits, pitfalls, and opportunities possible from establishing a culture of repeatable use of team metrics across a large organisation

Themes: Metrics, retrospectives, agile transformation, Agile Heuristics, Flow, Theory Of Constraints, Enterprise, Analytics, Communities of Practice, Agile Tools