You may have heard of pirate-metrics in the realm of startups and customer behavior because Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue and Referral gives us the acronym AARRR! which to some sounds somewhat piratey.
But that is not the kind of pirate metrics we’re talking about here. This is about a simple, quick and easy way to gather flow-data by just ‘carving a mark in the tally for every prize won [or in this case: For every day spent].’
The basic idea – as presented for example by Benjamin Mitchell in his Talk at the LKCE 2012, see slide 31 – is to just mark cards with a “tag” for each day that it spends in a certain column. For extremely narrow cadences this timeframe might be even smaller (e.g. half days). Basically it just means you
- assign “signs” to the columns (e.g. R = Ready, A = Acceptance test definition, S = Story Preparation, I = Implementation, P = Post processing) (remember to put the 'signs' on the board as well so that everybody can look up the meaning of the tags immediately) and
at defined intervals have somebody go over the board and 'tag' all cards according to their current column.
Use the information gathered by this in Kaizen events, retrospectives and the standup meeting.
Sample pirate tags
Sample of pirate tags created in half-day intervals on a (hypothetical and hopefully unrealistic) story card, that spent half a day in ready, one day (two half days) in the definition of acceptance criteria, half a day in story preparation, half a day in implementation and two-and-a-half days in post-processing.
Just a thought: Perhaps you don't need fancy software after all,to start getting quantitative feedback on your work...
till next time
Michael Mahlberg
2 comments:
The image "Sample Pirate Tags" is not displayed - is it up to me?
Hello JJ, no it was a mistake on my part - thanks for pointing it out. It should be fixed now. (At least it works on two of my machines)
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