Hyper-productive Agile teams play a crucial role in the success of organizations in today’s fast-paced and competitive world. Looking at data dashboards displaying the most essential aspects of inter- and intra-team delivery allows organizations to maintain and continuously improve their performance.
Power BI can elevate insight in more meaningful ways, such as understanding where there is a bottleneck in the flow and how predictable we are. In many cases, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools alone do not provide the necessary visibility or insight, and therefore organizations struggle to understand delays and problems in their processes.
Power BI, however, does connect to work management platforms, such as Jira and Azure Dev Ops. It is a business analytics tool – part of the Microsoft Power Platform – that assists with monitoring progress and surfacing information. Power BI dashboards present rich, interactive compositions of data to explore using slicers and drill-down capabilities.
Important dashboards typically include these dimensions or categories provided in 3 to 5 reports:
- Dashboards for leaders to show a quarterly plan (or any planning increment), including progress toward enacting the plan.
- Dashboards for Agile teams to display progress on achieving team goals (per quarter/per sprint) as well as identifying bottlenecks in the flow of work using multiple metrics.
- Dashboard to exhibit trends over time (monthly/quarterly/release) to identify areas that are improving and areas that are not. This includes reports on quality metrics, like defect trends, and metrics on predictability and value delivery.
Effectively measure what matters
For those striving to be effective Agile leaders and practitioners, there are principles to follow when dealing with metrics.
- Display metrics that complement each other.
- Avoid comparing one team to another.
- Focus on metrics that feature flow efficiency and metrics that enable better forecasting.
- Understand the effect of metrics on human behavior. Leadership pressures and misunderstandings may cause misuse of metrics.
- Use metrics that help the decision-makers to make better choices quickly and efficiently.
How can Springhouse help your organization improve Agile performance with Power BI?
You want your organization to improve continuously, so Springhouse offers the following three-part solution in partnership with AgileSparks:
- Education on Agile delivery and the most impactful KPIs for achieving flow, efficiency, and effectiveness. Learn how to measure what matters to create the right mindset and focus on the delivery of the right things on time and of quality, as well as continuous improvement.
- Construction of Power BI reports and dashboards that connect to your ALM tool.
- Collaboration on how to incorporate the dashboards into your process to help you solve problems quickly and efficiently.
So, request a preliminary conversation to understand how to continuously improve your Agile performance using Microsoft Power BI.