Quantitative SAFe Metrics in AgilePlace

Portfolio

Epic Burnup Charts

For Program Epics - use Cumulative Flow Diagrams at the Program Level filtered by a specific Epic parent card

For Portfolio Epics that are connected to multiple child boards for execution a good approximation is provided in the “Connections” tab for the Epic.

Epic Progress Measure

For each epic this view is provided on its “Connections” tab.

To get a panoramic view of all epics, the Portfolio Kanban has a good view of the progress of each Epic card which has connections. The progress bar reflects how many size points comprising this Epic are considered done in the relevant Program Board.

Note - these views currently don’t include an “Initial estimate”.

Program

Program Predictability Metric

The Objectives board helps in calculating this metric. Each PI objective is allocated the “Planned Business Value” during PI Planning which is tracked as the “card size” in our template.

Then as part of Inspect & Adapt workshop - based on the PI System Demo an actual business value number is allocated to the card - can be as a tag, sub-lanes of the “Done” lane of the Objectives board or just offline.

For each team, the predictability score is the aggregate actual / planned business value across their PI objectives. For the ART as a whole, the predictability score is the aggregate actual / planned across the PI objectives for all teams.

Feature Cycle Time

Open the Speed chart for the Program Kanban Board and look at cycle time. Select “Implementation” as the start lane to see pure cycle time. Select “Analysis” to see a cycle time that looks wider across the value stream to see also planning/prep activities for each feature. On the downstream side select “Releasing” to see pure development/testing cycle time and “Done” for real “DevOps” cycle time including deployment/release activities.

Program Velocity

Again, Open the Speed Chart for the Program Kanban Board and this time check “calculate based on card size” and look at the throughput - the sum of sizes of cards delivered each time period. You can see features cards delivered by the program and calculate the PI Program Velocity by looking at all time periods in the PI e.g. 10 weeks if using a weekly time period.

# Stories accepted

Open the Speed Chart for the Team Kanban Board and uncheck “calculate based on card size” and look at the throughput - the count of cards delivered each time period. You can see story cards delivered by the program across all teams. The finish lane should be the “Accepted” lane for all teams or the “PI Integration” lane.

# Enablers planned

Open the Distribution chart for the Program Kanban Board after PI Planning. Select just the “Current PI Backlog” lane in the “Select lanes to include” and select “Card type” as the attribute to categorize by. You will see the different types of Features/Enablers.

As you start execution also add the Implementation and further lanes to see execution proceeding - think about when you expect to see Enablers happening in this PI - balanced along the way, front-heavy, or coming in at the end. Look for this pattern in actual execution.

# Enablers accepted

Move the distribution report to focus on the Done lane and see distribution of features/enablers accepted in the PI.

Feature Progress Report

For each feature this view is provided on its “Connections” tab.

To get a panoramic view of all features, the Program Kanban Board has a good view of the progress of each Feature card which has connections. The progress bar reflects how many size points comprising this Feature are considered done in the relevant team lane on the Team Kanban Board.

For an overview of AgilePlace’s built-in reporting capabilities, see here.