Six months into a scaled agile rollout the sponsor asks whether it is working. What do you measure, and what do you refuse to report?
Answer
Short answer
Report the interval a customer experiences and the quality of what arrives, measured end to end across the programme rather than aggregated from teams. Refuse adoption counts, aggregated velocity and anything that a team can improve by reclassifying its own work.
Flow metrics are the cleanest way to tell whether the rollout changed delivery rather than vocabulary. Useful flow metrics show whether work moves faster, waits less, ages less, and crosses team boundaries with fewer surprises. Weak flow metrics count ceremonies, training completion, or framework adoption. Strong flow metrics connect the transformation to lead time, throughput, dependency ageing, escaped work, and whether teams can make decisions closer to the customer. Flow metrics should make the rollout accountable to delivery reality.
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Likely follow-ups
- You have no baseline because nobody measured before the rollout. What do you do at the six-month review?
- How would you report a measure that has got worse for a defensible reason?
- Which single measure would you give a team for its own use and never show upward?
- What would convince you to recommend abandoning the rollout rather than adjusting it?
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