Faster to market
Advanced
difficulty
Stage 4
Agile IQ® Level
Metrics
Practices
EBM
Framework
Introduction
Time to market measures teams’ ability to quickly deliver new capabilities, services, or products. It’s one of the four key value areas of business agility and business value.
Modelled time to market
After longitudinal statistical analysis of over 100 organisations over a 5+ yr period, an increase in a team’s Agile IQ® is a leading indicator of an increase in Time to Market.
What is your ability to deliver faster?
The reason why executives look at delivery speed is to minimise the amount of time it takes for the organisation to deliver value. Without actively managing time to market, the ability to sustainably deliver value in the future is unknown.
Questions that leaders need to continually re-evaluate for time to market are:
- How fast can the organisation learn from new experiments and information?
- How fast can you adapt based on the information?
- How fast can you test new ideas with customers?
When many teams coordinate their work in an Agile Release Train, it is the Product Manager who is accountable for making the decision whether to release or not, particularly with respect to larger Features.
Investment in capability is vital to improving delivery speed
Improving Time to Market requires investment of time and money. A leader’s role in an agile environment is to ultimately shift from managing individuals and tasks, to building and sustaining an agile capability that improves time to market.
Invest in Skills
Agile leaders don't manage tasks, they build capability. Building capability requires an investment of time and money and requires monitoring the impacts of investment against the improvements in skills development, training and mentoring.
Invest in Automation
All teams need technical support to transfer manual tasks to technology that can do them faster, including marketing and finance teams.
Invest in Metrics
Investments require metrics, beyond just "on time and on budget", to understand how much delivery capability is improving. Report on the impacts the investment is making, not the tasks or % complete of delivery-based milestones.
When designing teams, ensure that a manager’s role is clear – building capabilities over managing and delegating tasks with investment deliberately made by executive and product management.
Value Metrics to Understand Capability Investment
To encourage adaptability, Evidence Based Management (EBM) by Scrum.org defines a list that highlights exemplar measures that might help an organisation to:
- Understand its current time to market.
- Identify the factors that influence delivery speed.
- Describe metrics that will provide leading and lagging indicators that the investment in capability improvement is yielding the desired improvements in delivery speed.
Key Actions
Reduce Batch Size
The smaller the size of features the faster they can be handled by an experienced team.
Reduce WIP
The fewer the items currently being worked on, the less spread thin the team. This results in faster throughput.
Automation
Free people up from repetitive tasks by using automated workflows, including testing and deployment.
Slice work smaller
Slice backlog items so they are only about a days total effort by the team to deliver to Done.
Self-Management
When teams are given guardrails to self-organise, time to decision-making is reduced and works flow faster.
Remove QA Gates
Quality gates only identify defects, not build-in quality. Establish and improve the Definition of Done instead.
Measure the cost of delay
Do you know the cost of delay? Prioritisation by cost of delay gets the highest value out first.
Avoid technical debt
If you cut corners on quality now, you’ll still have to deal with it later. Technical debt is a silent killer of quality.
Identify and remove waste
Muda, Mura and Muri are key areas of waste to identify and systematically remove to improve the flow of delivery.