Leading indicator software

Diminishing ready backlog indicates we have less clarity on upcoming deliverables. Unstable velocity indicates we lack measurable progress that can forecast our completion by the release date.

Now lets imagine you are managing the product development division of your company and your goal is to meet the release commitment you made to your customers. The outcome is easy to measure: You either finished the items you committed to or not.

But how do you influence the outcome? What are the activities you must undertake to achieve the desired outcome? Make sure your team members are available when needed and not being shared with other teams. Ensure the team is remediating bugs as they go and not waiting until the end of the release to fix them. Look out ahead of the delivery team and mitigate any business, organizational, or technical risks that may delay them. For instance, the maximum allowed time to resolve critical priority incidents is 48 hours.

The outcome lagging indicator is easy to measure: You either resolve your incidents in 48 hours or not. Again, ask yourself, how do you influence the outcome? What are the activities to achieve the desired outcome? For example: Make sure staff start working on incidents immediately when they occur.

Begin measuring these indicators on a daily basis and focus on improving them. If you do, your organization is much more likely to reach its objectives. I have commonly seen organizations treating the leading indicators as the goal and measure of success.

This is misguided. The objectives are the lagging indicators, whatever they are. The goal for leading indicators is to improve them over time, to positively impact the lagging indicator. If your organization is often reorganizing or managers are often switching departments, it could indicate poor leadership near the top of the company.

Occasional reorganizations can be a good thing. They can eliminate redundancies and better leverage individual skill set. But generally, they indicate a course correction. Likewise, when you start seeing a lot of your colleagues, especially the ones that do a good job, leaving for greener pastures, you should consider joining them. But you should see increasing turnover as a reason to update your resume and at least see what opportunities are out there.

You also need to put in place business processes to analyze and take action. Remember that if measures do not drive decisions, then your actions are a waste of resources.

Your leading indicator might be a simple MVP. Tools like QuickMVP can support the implementation of a Tesla-style landing page to take pre-orders from your customers.

A common anti-pattern I see in many product management functions is a solution looking for a problem. In SAFe, leading indicators are an important element of your epic benefit hypothesis statement. Insight allows you to pivot at an earlier stage, saving considerable time and money. By diverting spending to where it will give a better return, you are living by SAFe principle number one, Take an economic view. I hope you can now see that leading indicators are very powerful and versatile, although not always obvious when you start using them.

Start with your ideation by creating a Leading to Lagging Pathway, working back from your desired lagging indicator. If you get stuck, recall that near-term lagging indicators can be used as leading indicators on your pathway too. Let me know how you get on. He is a techie at heart, now with a people and process focus supporting organisations globally to improve how they operate in a Lean-Agile way.

You will find him regularly talking at conferences and writing about his experiences to share his knowledge. View all posts by Glenn Smith. Author taylor. We use cookies to analyze website performance and visitor data, deliver personalized content, and enhance your experience on the site. Cookie Policy. By clicking Accept you consent to the use of all cookies.

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