I’m often asked how to measure the agility of a new team. I have devised elaborated agility self assessment tools for team to reflect on their agility. Somewhat useful when taken for face value: an occasion to reflect on principles and practices and a base for an organized retrospective.

Result driven metrics like story point acceptance ratio, number of open defects at the end of a sprint or customer satisfaction are also very valuable and easy/cheap to track and can be used in the arsenal of tracking systems, as long as they are few in number and only used as guidance and leading to more conversations.

I am working with new scrum teams and have recently came up with yet a simpler thermometer for feeling the agility of the teams: the email inbox!

I have been flooded by an incredible amount of “communication” done through email. So I decided to correlate the team daily email threads and doneness level. Prior to switching to scrum, the team was trading a 100+ email per person per day (!) with a completed request level of 10% (yarrrk). In just on iteration, the volume of email has decreased by 20% with a story completion rate of 50%.

Yes, agile works on face to face conversations, because writing things down takes and lags time and is everything but clear. So my inbox is now my proxy for knowing when the team is struggling in communicating.

I now don’t even have to read emails in detail. When I get a lot of them, I just need to ask “is something wrong? what roadblock can I help remove?“.