Agileista

Recently I've been looking at how to implement a balanced score card (BSC) approach to performance management, on top of our existing Scrum practices. We have decided that BSC is the best overall approach for the whole business and that we would need to find a way to integrate it with our Agile processes and metrics as these have been very successful. My first thought was that as long as we don't measure performance at an individual level we'd be ok. Wikipedia defines the BSC approach in it's introduction as:

"The key new element is focusing not only on financial outcomes but also on the human issues that drive those outcomes, so that organizations focus on the future and act in their long-term best interest. The strategic management system forces managers to focus on the important performance metrics that drive success. It balances a financial perspective with customer, process, and employee perspectives"

I posted to the Yahoo! scrumdevelopment group asking for advice and examples of how to do it. I'm happy to report that I got some great advice from people who've been there and done it. Mike Cohn advised:

"I'd then bring the company goals back to the engineering department and we put together our own version of a BSC. For the engineering group we came up with four categories that were different from Kaplan and Norton's. We then came up with strategic objectives, core outcomes,performance drivers, and critical success factors for each along the lines of traditional BSC advice"

It's encouraging to know that the great and the good of the Agile world have been there and done it. I'm now working up our own score card categories and strategic objectives in line with Mike's advice.Tom Popendiek advised me to take a look at Creating a Lean Culture by David Mann from Productivity Press, and further advised not to measure at the individual level.

Software development is a team activity, there's no getting away from it. When developing software is done in teams it stands to reason that measuring performance at the individual level can disrupt and damage the team and its output.

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