Dec 2 / Christian Triantafillou Schade

Bridging the metrics divide: Traditional vs. Agile in the modern enterprise

Many organizations adopt Agile, Scrum or DevOps methodologies to achieve benefits that give them a head start in our fast-moving and complex business world. But measuring a Scrum setup's intended benefits and operations can create tensions between the Scrum team and its corporate stakeholders. The entire enterprise governance across functions or departments is often closely integrated through metrics regarded as self-evident practices.

Traditional and Agile management metrics serve different purposes and align with distinct philosophies. Understanding their interplay can be critical to you as a stakeholder working with an Agile team or as a Scrum Master/Product Owner working with the non-Agile part of an organization.

The divergent philosophies of metrics

At their core, traditional metrics focus on predictability, control, and efficiency, emphasizing budgets, schedules, and predefined scopes. Agile metrics, on the other hand, prioritize value delivery, adaptability, and continuous improvement, reflecting the iterative and customer-centric nature of Agile frameworks.

This is an example of two metrics that both attempt to track delivery progress but for different reasons and with a very different approach:

Traditional KPI: Project Completion Status measures the progress against a fixed end goal.
Agile Metric: Sprint Burndown tracks the team’s progress in real time, adapting to changes in scope as needed.

While traditional metrics aim to monitor and enforce stability, Agile metrics embrace change, which can be challenging for managers accustomed to static benchmarks.

Mapping traditional metrics to Agile metrics

Despite the differences, some traditional metrics have counterparts in Agile frameworks:
  • Time to Delivery Cycle Time measure efficiency but differ in scope. Agile’s Lean-based metric, Cycle Time, measures the active work spent completing tasks.

  • ROI Incremental Value Delivery: Agile decomposes value into smaller increments, allowing frequent assessment.

  • Resource Utilization Velocity: Traditional approaches track how efficiently resources are used, while Velocity reflects team output without assigning blame to individuals.

These mappings underscore that while Agile and traditional metrics may align in intent, their execution and interpretation require context-sensitive translation. Scrum Teams often can only deliver conventional metrics with considerable conversion efforts, and even then, the data will look different from traditional projects or operational teams. In some cases (such as Resource Utilization), the metrics do not make sense from an Agile perspective. In Scrum, we do not equate the time spent per employee on a specific task with the value created.

This also means that no historical data might be available for comparison if a stakeholder requests a new custom report. Since Scrum Teams continuously optimize (and therefore change), their practices and process baselines also change frequently, making traditional investigations into cost overruns or delays very complicated, slow and resource-intensive.

Building a Metrics framework for Scrum Implementation

When implementing Scrum, measuring success involves balancing baseline metrics, value delivery, Scrum health, and organizational success. Each area provides insights into whether the team and organization are on the right path. Here are some examples:

Baseline metrics when starting Scrum

These metrics assess readiness for Scrum:
  • Team Readiness: Measure familiarity with Scrum principles and roles.

  • Stakeholder Engagement: Measure initial process confidence, participation in Sprint Reviews and planning.

  • Backlog readiness: Percentage of backlog items planned for the Sprint that meet the Definition of Ready.

Some other metrics can be used to indicate problems or improvements in the early Scrum implementation or when the Scrum Team is subjected to significant changes, such as new technologies, products or changes in team composition:

  • Enablers vs. Features: Are we building infrastructure or customer value?

  • Definition of Done compliance for deliveries: Are we building finished products?

  • Demo Rate: Are we subjecting our product to stakeholder reviews?

  • Sprint Planning Success Rate: Percentage of planned tasks completed.

  • Capitalized Technical Debt: Are you creating future problems by taking shortcuts?

Remember that you can’t map specific fluctuations in the metrics directly to problems and solutions. They are indicators and conversation starters, and the first thing to do when you want to understand the reality behind the numbers is to have a conversation with your Scrum team.

Value Delivery metrics

Scrum thrives on delivering value early and often:
  • Value Delivered per Sprint: Quantifies the tangible business value of completed tasks.

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): Tracks customer loyalty, a key Scrum outcome.

  • Lead Time for New Features: Measures responsiveness to opportunities.

Scrum health metrics

A healthy Scrum team in a sound context delivers consistently:
  • Sprint Goal Success Rate: Monitors how often teams achieve planned objectives.
  • Defect Density: Highlights quality issues in delivered features.

  • Automated Test Coverage: Ensures built-in quality.

Organizational success

Scrum’s broader impact can be gauged through:
  • Flow Efficiency: Reveals bottlenecks across the organization, including management.

  • Value delivered over time: A high-level metric that (among others) indicates if it was a good idea to launch Scrum or if we are doing it correctly for our context.

  • Innovation Rate: Measures investment in forward-thinking efforts.

  • Strategic theme distribution of features: Do we deliver output that supports the organization’s strategy?

Practical strategies for balancing metrics

When bridging the gap between traditional and Agile metrics, consider these strategies:

Use dashboards for correlation: Create visual tools that translate Agile metrics into familiar formats for traditional stakeholders. For example, compare Defect Density with historical Defect Rates to highlight quality improvements. This does not mean converting the data, however.

Educate stakeholders: Explain how Agile metrics like Velocity or Flow Efficiency align with overarching business goals.

Focus on trends over single data points: Agile thrives on iteration; trends provide a better picture than isolated metrics.

Pair metrics for context: For example, combine Velocity with Sprint Goal Success Rate to assess whether increased output aligns with planned goals.

If you identify a gap between the Agile metrics and what you can get with the remaining conditional ones, consider cost and usefulness before you demand that teams deliver both; you might not need them.

The Bigger Picture: Why Metrics Matter

Both Agile and traditional metrics are tools, not outcomes. Their purpose is to provide insights that guide decision-making and foster improvement. For managers transitioning to Agile, the key is to balance planning with flexibility and deliver value continuously while retaining visibility into resource use and quality control.

By thoughtfully integrating these metrics, organizations can achieve the best of both worlds: the agility to seize opportunities and the structure to stay on course.

Learn more:

For a deeper dive into implementing Scrum metrics effectively, request a download link for the 42-page presentation:
For a comprehensive overview of how managers can optimize the way they work with Scrum Teams, explore our unique course:
Write your awesome label here.
Get the course now:

Scrum for managers and Stakeholders

A Roadmap to Agile Success
You’ll learn to engage with Scrum teams, improve collaboration, and build agility in your organization. The course covers Scrum fundamentals from a leadership perspective, focusing on your role in supporting product development, managing expectations, and aligning business goals with team outcomes.

Get ready to transform how you lead and collaborate. Scrum for Managers and Stakeholders is your tool to succeed in the fast-paced Agile world!
Empty space, drag to resize
Write your awesome label here.

Dive deeper into Agile metrics

Understanding Agile and Scrum metrics for non-Agile managers
Free 42-page presentation
  • Bridging the gap between traditional and Agile management
  • Traditional/Agile metric mapping
  • Measuring the success of Scrum
  • Challenges with Agile metrics

Christian Triantafillou Schade

Agile Leadership Consultant, writer and trainer. Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer (RTE).
About your trainer
Christian is an Agile practitioner, seasoned project manager, accredited Scrum & DevOps trainer and leadership consultant. He is now bringing his expertise and unique view of Agile, modern leadership and related disciplines such as Scrum and DevOps to the students at the Corporate Revolutionary Academy, which he has co-founded.

More posts from The New Path:

Created with