“In God we trust, everyone else, bring data”

Recently I’ve been collecting metrics from my newest teams who are doing a brilliant job of transforming their ways of working to Agile. This quote from W. Edwards Deming “…bring data” encapsulates what has been by far the most powerful piece of ‘evidence’ I’ve collected about Agile being: Better, Faster, Cheaper. I’ve always instinctively known it’s a much more effective way of developing software and connecting teams to their delivery results, but check out these statistics:-

Small enhancements delivered in previous year = 10 Baseline statistic.

Small enhancements delivered in first 6 months post Agile transformation = 30

That’s a six fold improvement in throughput of enhancements!

This impressive result built the trust which allowed us to expand our use of Agile and restructure our team to align 4 streams of work to our business verticals. With some additional budget and some new great hires, it looks like we may now deliver somewhere between 70 and 100 enhancements in the year post commencing our Agile transformation journey. That’s an impressive improvement over the baseline of 10.

Statistics sometimes cause us to ask more questions than they answer. But impressive, indisputable results like the above are compelling enough to make people sit up and listen. Let the numbers do the talking.