Advanced Analytics
As Agile practices scale from small teams to large organizations that demand evidence for decision making, it’s time to demonstrate and quantify the value of improvement.
Rally’s advanced analytics provide insights from powerful metrics that measure productivity, quality, predictability, and responsiveness. Use these insights to steer strategy and achieve business goals.
Achieve a virtuous cycle between qualitative and quantitative insight, where a hunch can be proven true or false via metrics -- which in turn leads to more insights.
Who Needs Metrics?
Leaders of Agile teams need metrics that let them identify top performing teams and why they are top performing. They want a way to identify a risky trend and what can be done to minimize or eliminate that risk.
With Rally’s advanced analytics, teams are able to analyze cycle time accurately, understand bottlenecks, and reduce WIP. This allows teams to visualize progress over time, improve team performance, and meet business goals.
Trend Team Performance
At its foundation, Rally's advanced analytics enable the analysis of team performance over time. Organizations can see trends and compare team performance before and after an event, such as a process or resource allocation change, which provides insight for decision-making. Use the reports to provide powerful, real-time metrics to help steer strategy.
A key element of Advanced Analytics are new apps that can be used out-of-the-box, or you can create your own customizations using the new Lookback API and AppSDK 2.0. toolkit - after all, it’s your data.
Using Metrics to Steer
Balance is the key to driving good behaviors. With a balanced approach towards metrics, you equally emphasize the four aspects of doing it fast, doing it right, doing it on time and with a high level of employee engagement. It is essential to find the right decisions that balance time to market, quality, and commitments without compromising employee engagement or customer satisfaction.
How Does it Work?
Using Rally’s new Advanced Analytics technology, tools, and coaching services (and if needed, our platform extension team), we can help explore alternative ways to calculate metrics for each of the following categories:
| To improve | Adjust these | Based on metrics |
|---|---|---|
| Productivity |
Single team membership, co-located teams, persistent teams |
Value delivered for unit cost |
| Quality | Test-driven development, test automation, static analysis, continuous integration, pair programming |
Defect arrival rate Defect density |
| Predictability | Work in process (WIP), plan feedback frequency/precision, persistent teams |
Throughput stability Cycle time stability Schedule and cost deviation |
| Responsiveness & Time to Market | Work in process (WIP), release frequency, acceptance test automation, dedicated/persistent/co-located teams |
Cycle/Lead time trend Release frequency Release lag time |
We can also help find ways to integrate survey tools that capture these other metrics:
| To improve | Adjust these | Based on metrics |
|---|---|---|
| Customer satisfaction | Stakeholder participation, iteration length, release frequency, Single team membership, persistent teams | Net Promoter Score |
| Employee Satisfaction | Sustainable pace, Single team membership, persistent teams, co-located teams |
Employee Net Promoter Score Turnover |
Advanced Analytics Apps in Rally
A team using kanban (or most other methodologies) can use the two new Rally apps built on the Advanced Analytics system to produce useful insights:
- Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) - Gain deeper insight into flow of work. Visualize throughput and project completion time, in the same way a Scrum team uses a burn up chart. Metrics including WIP, cycle time, lead time, and throughput can all be extracted from the CFD
- Time in Process Chart (TIP) - The Time In Process chart provides insight about the amount of time it will take to move work through your value stream or some portion of it.
