Dashboards and ART Insights

Effective dashboards and ART insights are crucial to navigating the complexities of Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and organizational alignment.

In this episode of SPCs Unleashed, Mark Richards, Stephan Neck, Niko Kaintantzis, and Ali Hajou delve into the strategic role of dashboards in improving alignment, transparency, and performance. They explore the balance between automation, stakeholder engagement, and avoiding vanity metrics.

Key Takeaways:

• Purpose-driven dashboards: Focus on real-time guidance, stakeholder alignment, and context-driven insights rather than just data aggregation.
  • “Dashboards should facilitate conversations; it’s not just about showing data.” - Mark Richards
• Avoiding “vanity metrics”: Dashboards should reflect reality and enable actionable insights rather than presenting polished but meaningless metrics.
  • “Ask why before creating a metric; not all data leads to action.” - Stephan Neck
• Ownership and adaptability: Teams and stakeholders must own and adapt dashboards for context-specific needs, evolving them as organizational priorities shift.
  • “Dashboards aren’t pets; treat them like navigation systems.” - Nikolaos Kaintantzis 
• The automation balance: Automate only after defining what needs automation, ensuring flexibility for improvement cycles.
  • “Over-automated dashboards risk being inflexible and irrelevant as priorities change.” - Ali Hajou
• Stakeholder interaction: Dashboards should encourage dialogue and collaboration rather than replacing them.
  • “Dashboards should trigger valuable discussions, not just display information.” - Stephan Neck

Transcript

Mark Richards: 0:01

You're listening to SPCs unleashed a shaping agility project that emerged from the 2023 Prague safe summit. The show is hosted by Swiss SPC, T Stephan Nick and Niko kaintances, Dutch, spct, Ali Hajou and Aussie safe fellow, Mark Richards. We're committed to helping SPCs grow their impact and move beyond the foundations taught during implementing safe each week we explore a dimension from the frameworks competencies. We share stories about our journeys, the secrets we found and the lessons we learned the hard way. Good day and welcome to 2025 and our first episode of SPC is unleashed for the year in continuation of, you know, the way we closed last year, out of finding things that we care about deeply and picking a topic to talk about, I think once upon a time, I would have laughed if you'd told me I would ever care deeply about dashboards in tools. But funnily enough, time breaks you. And Ali cares even more than us, and we are going to have an episode with Ali here where we don't talk too much about hardware, I suspect, which will be very strange. So Ali, take us away, not

Ali Hajou: 1:11

today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, indeed. I think I had exactly the same thing, you know, as an Agilist, sort of in every, let's say, part of my DNA, focusing on principle seven, where we should look at actual stuff, working systems, rather than documentation, and rather than dashboard and data. And in reports, I do notice that people actually find them very useful, especially whenever you work with lots of people, like in a train. So this episode is going to be is going to to focus on the topic of dashboards and insights. Insights in your train, insights in, let's say, product development, because whenever we talk about a lot of people, you know, that's, you know, a train is sort of an organic thing, which is very weird. It moves. It shapes itself. It changes. It changes its way of working, its way of collaboration. It changes what we are doing. So it's constantly evolving, and it's very difficult for an individual in that sort of soup of movement to understand, you know, how far are we how are we doing? What are we missing? What are we missing? Compared to last quarter, last half year, is there any progress or trends to see, you know, are we indeed improving, other than our collective gut feel. So it's pretty, pretty tough to see that as an individual. So it's therefore I just I saw more and more the need to have some form of a summarized, slash, aggregated view. And you see that, you know, in the world of automation, more and more dashboards are being used in the world of automation. More and more data is being generated. So this episode will be about dashboards, reports, insights, and let's say anything that can help an art to be very involved with itself, or how to involve stakeholders with a train. So how to, let's say, not only look at working systems, but also look at just the truth the data. So in this show, we're going to talk about many things. One of them is how data can help you become a better train, well more aware. Mark will talk about the quality of dashboards data and how doing it wrong can completely disturb the ability to improve. Niko will talk about how data dashboards and insights should be used to bring your stakeholders a little bit closer to your train, and Stephan will emphasize how these tools be said, because, actually, that's what it is. Can be used as sort of a, I called it a sensor for action. I don't know. I was like, Huh? This is sort of, that's sort of what triggered me when, when I saw your preparations. Sounds good? Yeah, it's approval. So you know, and let's say great SBC unleashed tradition, starting with the first question, what is your true passion? Special moment, surprise challenge related to this topic. And I'll just start with person that's actually all the way on the top of our list. Mark.

Mark Richards: 4:40

All right, so I think I alluded to my passion here in warming up. I'm a visual management junkie, so if I went back to my first five or six years as a coach, I would say you need a tool, because you're going to need an audit trail, but it's all about your visuals and the conversations you see happening at those visuals. Test your visual management. So how often do you see people standing near having a conversation, pointing at stuff because it helps them have a better conversation? And you know, over time scale, and obviously you know the fact that so few of us are co located. Now you've got to move the digital path down there, but keeping that visual management mindset as you start thinking about dashboards, about dashboards, that's my special passion in this world. About You. Niko, thank you.

Ali Hajou: 5:27

Thank you. Yeah. For me, I have

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 5:30

a special history for metrics and dashboards. For me, the next step of the metrics and I was all I had always the opinion, you can fake everything. So if somebody wants to be on time. You just could go to the burn down charts, etc. You just fake everything. You can fake metrics. You just can, can shine. And then I thought, okay, now I have a dashboard which shows not relevant things. So at the end, my passion was with a mandate, when somebody else asked me to do more about metrics and more about about dashboards, and now I had really do something professional and have another opinion. I said it sucks something like that. And what I realized, what is really important, or what my passion is at the moment, is saying no, if somebody wants a dashboard higher than me, let's say I'm in an art and the portfolio or a manager wants a dashboard for him, I say, Yeah, do it your own. I don't need this data. So in my case, my passion is try to find out what I need, what my art needs, or what my team means when I'm scrum master and only use this data. As Ali said, we have so many, many data. You can display everything, then you display nothing. So find out what is important for you and create something that helps you, guide your art team portfolio, wherever you are. And

Stephan Neck: 6:47

I think that relates perfectly with the challenge I have when it comes to dashboards, reports and insights. As a coach, I always get this discussion very early in the transformation, what tool, what dashboard? And I like to inverse that and say, guys, um, what are we talking about? Again? What does it serve for? Right? Because it's very tangible. There's the tool, there's some initial dashboards. Let's use it. It's nice and shiny. But is it really helpful being aligned and staying on track? And that's what the dash dashboard is for me, right? If you take a train driver or a car driver, your dashboard is indicating if you're still a good driver, if you're within the speed limit and stuff like that. And I like, I like calling it a challenge and dashboards, as you say, Ali, the keyword it should be useful, if it's not useful. And as you said, Niko, skip it.

Ali Hajou: 7:50

Yeah, it's, it's, it should be useful. But then, in a way, I don't know how to call it. And let me just explain my thought it should be not too useful, because there is, I've noticed something, and I would like to just check that with you, is that if you have good data, then the dashboards become very useful and very truthful, which might also cause people to stakeholders and project leads to move away from the people and only focus on the dashboards. Because, you know, the dashboards tell me enough the thing, because I'm very conflicted there. So the dashboards, you know, progress, you know, the ability to deliver, the ability to resolve issues, tell a lot about how, you know, how teams operate, which is fantastic, but simultaneously, can also sort of isolate the stakeholders to then only look at those dashboards. You know, because I have my information, I don't need to go to those systems, those system demos anymore, because I can just look at at the dashboard. So it's, I'm conflicted. I like that a lot. So I like the fact that it happens, but it's also it has a potentially nasty after effect. So I think that brings us to our first trigger, which is a trigger about how these, let's say, these insights on how we are performing. So the, how do you show? How do you call it? The dashboards, the visuals, the reports on how we are performing, are beneficial or not beneficial. So how they can help out the train, or how they can potentially, even, I don't know, destroy the train node. That's not the right word, but really sort of counteract what we're trying to achieve with the train. I'll start with I'll start with Mark.

Mark Richards: 9:52

So this is a, I guess, particular passion for me. And if I went back to 2017 i. Spent a lot of time actually putting together a model. That was the way I thought about how an arts performing. And the challenge I've got when you think about what does performance look like, but a lot of people is, you know, are we on time and on budget? You know, are we going to hit what we promised to hit and not to negate that's important, but it's, it's, it's one of so many things you should be thinking about, you know, and one of those might be Ali, on time and on budget for the right things. And, you know, you're looking at a set based view of life for an art so I actually put together, there's like a six part blog series going this is the way that I would think about the standard metrics dashboard every art should have to tell you how it's doing. And I have this belief when it comes to metrics, that you need to come at things from multiple perspectives. Because I love anytime I put a dashboard together, I think I want it to be useful from both directions. The people who contribute to it should be able to look at that dashboard and go, it's telling me useful things, and the people who steer it, govern it, own it, sponsor it, should be able to look at the same dashboard and find use in it. So you've actually got both sides of the party looking at the same data. And you know, I looked in my model, and we'll stick a URL to it in in the comments here. But I looked and I said, I want four quadrants, and there's a quadrant which is really business impact. How are we doing in terms of moving the needles we're meant to be moving as an art. There's a quadrant speed. Are we going faster sustainably? Lead time, cycle time, various flavors of that. There's a Quadrant for culture, right? Are people happy? Are our sponsors happy? Are we staying? Are we attracting more people? You know, how's the culture going? And then a quantum for quality. And fundamentally, the question is, are we doing a better at building quality in and thinking about things through all of those angles? And there's a quote that I love from one of the Intel guys, and he basically said, for every measure, there should be another measure introduced that measures the potential adverse impact of the first one. So it's back to, you know, Demings quote, you know, give somebody a measure and they'll cheerfully destroy your organization to achieve it, making sure that what's on your dashboard has the balances to go, Oh, if this is going well and it's killing us, is that going to show up somewhere else? All right? That was a long diatribe. That's

Ali Hajou: 12:26

I see. I see the passion on the topic, and the thing is very relevant, because it's, how should I call it? It's so easy to just make another dashboard for just yet another stakeholder. It's so difficult to just really look at the same thing and have every involved stakeholder, I don't know, accepting that. Yeah, yeah. How about you? Stephan, that's

Stephan Neck: 12:53

interesting picking up Mark's thread and and I heard that dashboards and metrics, they should and they will evolve over the time. I'm just coming from a first pi playing of two arts, and the focal point was alignment, right? So we teach and we train, you should have pi objectives, and this alignment is one of the, for me, the important parts of a dashboard all the time, because if you then go into execution, we always start an artsync with a confidence vote. Did it change from the last week, right? Does it give an indication and not becoming a progress statement gathering where people talk about how they're busy, how busy they are, how successful they are, we want to see the indications are we still on track, right? So PI objectives very important for for me, but I'm sure, and the discussions on day two in PI planning already went into Oh, how will they evolve over the time? Because we have other focal points, from from, from a strategic perspective. And Mark mentioned that right? You have the business owners in there. They have a different perspective. The art triad has a different perspective, and the team even have a different perspective. So for me as well, an art performing well is an amalgamation of different perspectives, different dashboards ending up in a good collaboration. In front of those dashboards. The dashboards tell you something, but you have to evaluate. You have to talk about it. Is the indication more in a positive form, or are we steering into a direction where we don't want to go? So this triggers now a discussion, and I'm happy after the two the API planning that people not grab those dashboards in gr or whatever you're using as the truth. They understood the guiding star for each team and the kind of aggregation on an art level, and even above the art level, where we had to aggregate on two arts now, please, helping going into the right direction. First of all, creating alignment, and from then on, discussing what other dashboards or data do we need to answer questions, and that was really helpful. So

Ali Hajou: 15:32

you in you, you what you're trying to do. Stephan, if I'm trying to put that in my own words, is you're trying to blend dashboards and data into, let's say, moments of synchronization that are already existing, where we actually look at real progress, rather than, you know, just progress in an Excel sheet, but they're looking at real progress, And then you augment that with some additional insights

Stephan Neck: 16:02

Exactly. It starts with peer objectives. It starts with initial data. And you, as a coach and as an SPC, you ask the right questions to steer the people into the direction where they collaborate and talk about what other data do we need, and then all the kind of red thread from data to information to knowledge to understanding, triggers the evolution of those dashboards. And I'm sure if you do that in the right way, they will change over the time. It's

Mark Richards: 16:35

definitely an aspect of sitting there going, what's the conversation I want people to have in front of this dashboard. Yes, that, for me, is a huge piece of dashboard design. Is what's the conversation? Who's going to have? It exactly,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 16:49

and that's the idea of the purpose of a dashboard. It's not only showing data, it's It's facilitating discussions. Is showing you where you're going, maybe help you see you're not being just a passenger wherever you go. So when I heard Mark, I realized, wow, he's multi dimensional. Because I'm much more one dimensional in this perspective. It's all about the performance. So, but I start small, and then the line gets fatter and feather. So maybe I should start doing also patterns afterwards. But the first thing I try to do is, let's show the people the progress and how they can steer the progress. And of course, those who know me, it will, it will get automatically social and and feeling touchy, because part of it, if the goal is reach a goal, reach API, objective, or whatever, you will have to talk to people. You will have to talk to business owners, stakeholders. If you want to show progress, you have to start deploy continuously. So you go also to technical aspects. But to make an easy start, I just start with the performance, the real performance, where does it go and then open up the field? But I think maybe quadrants could be something cool afterwards of the beginning. So I start small with performance,

Ali Hajou: 18:03

yeah, so it's, I think, Niko, you've, you've, I think you, in a way, have a sort of, you have, I think, the same approach, or similar approach, as Stephan, where you look at the results and you try to, you try to find indicators of, you know, how are we performing? Was this better than before? It'll be very nice to see that from the moment. You know me as an Agile coach, joined, then all of a sudden, performance dipped, or something like that, just an indicator to continue the conversation. And I think seeing dashboards as, yeah, as indicators or so, it's actually a very nice approach of doing so I've, I've had very weird experiences when I would add money into the question. So whenever we talk about dashboards, whenever we add money as a as part of the equation, such as, you know, how far are rather than just, you know, how are we progressing on our PI objectives? Also adding into account, how are we performing in terms of, you know, find finishing a budget, so spending the capacity that we have on a certain topic and epic that has been funded, and all of a sudden, dashboards get a way different. I don't know, characteristic Mark mentioned earlier that you know, you'd like to have some form of an audit trail in one form or another. You would like to be make it useful, useful and and with whenever adding money, then all of a sudden this audit trail aspect becomes even more emphasized, because people want to look back. And I've. I just is it something that you see as well the moment that you add money into the equation, whether it's a dashboard or whatsoever, that that, that you see that, that you see that the conversation is changing. Stephan, absolutely,

Stephan Neck: 20:14

just going back to this two day PR planning again this week, we had lots of project managers, program managers, in there, beside the business owners and the PMS. And in preparation, the collaboration between the PMs and the pls the project leaders were not that good. But in PI planning, you have to collaborate, right? Because you have all those features in there. And all of a sudden you saw people going around asking questions, where does this feature come from? What does it impact if we start decomposing it and playing it and in the end of day one, a business owner helping a team, unloading stories that relate to features that are not that strategically important. Shows that money is an issue also for PLS, project leaders, right? Project managers. And I think we shouldn't forget, if we start a new train, there's still the old world. You're in a hybrid situation, and money is a big issue, right? And I highly suggest introduce those guys as early as possible, and I see some smiling faces from my mates, because hey, welcome to the real world. Money is an issue. And yes, those dashboards are there, and we have to satisfy them.

Ali Hajou: 21:37

Yeah, yeah.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 21:38

And it starts changing the purpose, because it's a new requirement. Before it was the idea you want to steer your own art, and now you have somebody you have you have to report to, or somebody has an interest in it, and then it changed the meaning of a dashboard, and maybe do a bad way, I don't know, but it changes because now you have one requirement more. And

Stephan Neck: 21:57

by the way, Niko just just to throw that in, that forced us to take a feature that was in the first 10 positions on the wizchiff, to take it out, because we found out strategically, it's not impactful, and we dropped it in PI planning. Hooray. Cool. I

Mark Richards: 22:20

think the other aspect though, because I've had plenty of dashboards that have money in them, and one of the things I think is really important is your dashboard should be changing over time. And you know, if you look at that world that says a dashboard should have multiple audiences, every audience is going to have something that excites them that they look at first. And you know, maybe you can drag their attention to look at other things on the dashboard, but there will be certain people who will look at that burn rate. But are we over, under? How's the money spent going? And often in your early days, that will be a dominant thing, right? Are we spending the right amount of money, and are we going to land the plan? But as your art evolves, you know, one of the things you'll learn is that you become pretty predictable, right? Fixed capacity art where you always spend the right amount of money, you might have a little bit of variability in your features. You get better as an art, you're going to be pretty predictably learning your plan. And so these things, whether it's you know how the money's being spent, or something else, they might be on the dashboard, but you're never talking about them, right? And and being ready to recognize, hey, we've evolved. We don't see we don't need those things anymore, because they're not actually supporting our conversations. They're not high visibility things. It's having the discipline to go, what do we no longer need? Because we no longer need to talk about it, to make space for what's the data we really do need based on where we're at at the moment, the conversations we're trying to shift right now. But I

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 23:44

would like to add something into the always for the better. Sometimes when money it's on the table, or when money influences the dashboard, you have to visualize stupid things, like, how much is the story points costs in real time, or something like that, because some people want to know more. So you just mentioned the good part of it, mark, which is nice to know, but it's also the other part. Just people saying, I have the money and I need to know what money happens. And then you have really stupid metrics there. And that's why I said in the beginning. And just want to visualize things I need to so if I don't need these numbers, so please find it yourself, create your own dashboard. We

Mark Richards: 24:23

had a good example with money, like a client of mine last year, and it was a colors of money question. And if you haven't read the guidance article Niko co authored on the colors of money, go have a read. It's a great article. But for a lot of arts there are money. There's money that comes from different places, and you have to be pretty controlled that, you know, money is being spent in the proportions that go with the different constraints, right? Is a different contractual source, is it? You know, capitalization versus OpEx? You know, what is the question these guys had a scenario, and they'd had it for years. You. That there were three very distinct colors of money that went into their art, and they were always struggling to balance, particularly one of those sources of money. And so they went through a whole thing where, you know, the way the teams were prioritizing their work, the way the work was consuming money and the source of the funding, and the correlation to budget for the source of the funding got put on every team dashboard, and all of the teams started to go, actually, we're going to keep an eye on this every sprint. And all of a sudden, literally, within the space of a PI or two, they were landing perfectly. They were in a better controlled budget position than they ever had before, because they'd educated the teams on how the sources of funding, influences situate the choices they should be made, particularly as product owners about priorities and and so you got this magical transformation because you put data that traditionally was, you know, the province of finance and management, in the hands of the team, and said, Hey, can you look after this? And then it went away as an issue, because they were landing it so beautifully. Think

Ali Hajou: 26:01

that's an indicator in itself, right? That that if we're so focused, I mean, I don't know how to call it, we need to understand how certain initiatives are being funded. We need to understand that, or how we distribute our capacity on the different types of work that we that we have, we need to understand that. But just steering based on money is a very dangerous thing, which I'm, I must say, it's, I'm still not, not entirely sure how to, how to sort of fix that, you know, to just have people that are that, that that's that too quickly. Move to the discussion of, well, look at the you know, most of the capacity of this train is actually funded for a certain certain topics, but we're actually going to spend our capacity on other topics, which might be the right situation, but it's it, and it should be an indicator for some more discussion, because apparently there are more important topics that that are not funded that well. So a good indicator, good indicator to sort of understand how we are performing. There are many indicators, actually what I would like to sort of move, to make a little jump to the next topic, which is an indicator that is typically are indicators that are typically not, let's say, quantitatively, pulled out of, out of existing systems like Azure, DevOps, JIRA and financial systems. I'd like to talk a little bit about, and sort of test your brains about survey data, information that you'd that you'd want to have out of either your stakeholders, your customers, or the customers of the train, or maybe even the engineers, the team members in The train. And I don't know whether, whether you experience the same, but especially now with, you know, Microsoft forms is really useful if poly as a plug in in Microsoft Teams, and there's so many other you know, these are, these are not just shameless plugs, but you know, tools that are so read, readily available so many people know them, Survey Monkey and whatsoever. Surveys are extremely useful, and they're very easy to create. Hence, before you know it, everyone has created a survey, and everyone is bombarding everyone with surveys. And it comes from RTEs, it comes from coaches, it comes from other people. And people tend to get very tired of the huge amount of surveys that are being sent out. So my question to all of you is, how to combat this survey tiredness, this survey fatigue,

Stephan Neck: 28:58

I've been in that situation Ali many times, as an employee, as a coach, as an SBC, the question for me is always, why do we have a survey? So it's about the why, right? Just talking to Ali recently, and we talked about, we should measure outcome. Yes, that's okay. We should measure competencies, capabilities. We should measure flow. We all have the tools at hand. And I looked at these latest guys and said, Okay, what do you want to measure and why? Yeah, we have to. And I said, No, the question was different. What do you want to do now? How do we want to get the information, the data that is most helpful for you guys as an enabling team for the transformation? And that led to a discussion, where are we on the path on the transformation? Where are we on the implementation roadmap? What's the challenge to tackle? And immediately it surfaced. What we should ask for, and then those in charge coming up with with the survey will do the right thing. Or you might even find out it's not a survey. We should empower better artifacts, better events, better we you might even address the SPCs in your art, or SBCs in all the arts, and say, Guys, we have a general challenge. So, yeah, be clever. Be smart. Ask the for the why and what are the indications that you need for change, for Change Action. Otherwise, you're busy like how you like a change factory, and people don't know what happens. I

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 30:45

can second that what Stephan said it's really important to know, or to let the people know why you are doing it, because i Meanwhile, think everybody just sends you a survey because they have to. And you can imagine, I don't like, I have other things to do with my time than just doing surveys for somebody will they will never read or just do a graphic, and nobody is interested in it. So why are you doing that? And by the way, doing a survey, so it's something you just clicky, clicky, and then you're finished. In my four years, I think I've never mentioned that I gave trainings for retirement engineers with certification. And one thing, one part, was surveys. And it's really a profession doing a survey, because if you have a goal, you have, as Mark said at the beginning, you need counter measures. You need counter questions to realize, do they really mean that, or where they kind of Yeah, I just click something. Because if they just click something, the next question, a little bit lower will show you that. Yeah, it goes in the wrong direction. You say, Okay, this is not a valid answer. So it's really a profession, not something I do. Yeah, I give it. My kids do something with very monkey. I don't have Papa doesn't have time. And when you finish, I will send it to my clients. So it's really a profession. But make clear, why are you doing it, and what's happening with the data? What do you want to do with the data? Officer, data after the survey? Then just doing a survey is it's very cheap, but yeah, because people get every day, I think tons of, yeah, dozens of surveys you need to do better. And I personally like to explain why we're doing this, and not just here's the survey. What do you think about it? Yeah.

Stephan Neck: 32:20

And I would even add, I would even add to the level what you said, Niko, right? It's an art to come up with the right survey, right? If you are checking competencies, and you might start on, on team and technical agility, agile product delivery and lean, agile leadership. When you start a new train, when you start in your transformation. The danger for me is you pick those Excel sheets and you send them around. It might even be moderated. You go through all the questions without having talked in your enabling team or in your coaching team. What should we really ask for? Right? The context is key. So that's the danger of those nice and shiny Excel sheets. It's a lot of blood, sweat and tears before you send out the survey.

Mark Richards: 33:12

I think often surveys can wind up becoming vanity metrics as well. Yes, I've seen an awful lot of people run an awful lot of surveys that really just felt like we want some vanity metrics to show that our transformations going amazing, but, but I think the other thing there is not just vanity metrics, but you know, are you doing something with the feedback and you guys alluded to, Is it visible? That's probably the first thing to me, if we're surveying people, and particularly thinking about some of your cultural measures. A lot of that's going to be qualitative, but you can usually do some kind of quant summary on the qualitative stuff. Is that showing up in your dashboards? Are you treating as a first class citizen? Or are your dashboards all about, you know, organizational stuff, like, you know, money and delivery and, you know, survey data is a different type of citizen. Because I think if there's one thing that people really, really get sick of, it's you asking for them opinion and not doing anything with the answers they give you. I any one of my clients that I'm coaching who starts talking about a survey, it's like, what are we going to do with it? I do with it? Firstly, how are we going to broadcast the answers and and share back with people what what came out of it? Secondly, how are we going to show that there's a commitment and accountability to doing something with the data they give us? Because we can't show that. Let's not waste their emotional energy sending a survey out. I've if

Ali Hajou: 34:40

I, if I may, there is a, there's a dashboard technique that was presented by Henrik nieberg A couple years ago, which is the, was it again, the team health check? I think it's called, or the squad health check. Yep. Um, which we tried that out at a, at a, at a client, multiple agile teams. We really wanted to move away from the very numeric type of dashboards. We're trying to move to a more of a dashboard that shows trends. You know, are we doing better compared to last time on a couple of factors? And it's and we created a I think it was once every two sprints, like a very quick four minute moment during the system demos, to get information and then to very quickly display the results. But what we saw is that the effect was not from teams. No, the effect was actually coming from project managers and line management stating, hey, team, I see that you're not that happy. I want you to do something about that for the upcoming measurement. Because what I think, to be honest, I think it's sort of it reflected the results reflected back on them. They got questions like, Hey. Why? Why your team or your your people, whatever that might be, why are they not that happy? So they just it, just it cascaded completely, sort of the wrong direction. So hence a little bridge to the next topic, which is, you know, how to how to make them valuable, how to make them not, not misused. And I'll start with Niko.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 36:29

I'm so happy that mark and me already answered this question. I really love the last lost comment, so it's one of my highlights. And how I try to make it more valuable is we try to find out why. So it's again, like, like, the other question, what's the purpose? What are we doing with the data? Or is it just because it's on the roadmap, or it's on the backlog? I have to do a survey. So what is the reason why we are doing this and trying also a way how those visualization helps you so only the standard civilization, sometimes you have to tweak a little bit that really helps you fulfill this goal. So it's always asking about the why, and if you have no answer, don't do it. Yeah,

Stephan Neck: 37:05

I'm probably repeating myself, right? If you don't know where you are heading to, if you don't know the strategic intent, if you don't know what is the life cycle intent of a solution, how do you interpret a dashboard with the data, right? So the question is, in which context are you? What do you try to find out? And that's how you evolve your dashboards. It's interesting. For one client, we were working with some students from a university, helping the client coming up with mock ups for dashboards on a team level, art level, portfolio level. And the students did a good job. They came up with a mock up, and I asked questions, why do you have this structural element on it? And there was silence in the room, and they said, Because sources tell me because Scaled Agile tells me because this and that what we read should be on it. And I said, What's the shoot? Could you tell me? And they couldn't, and they probably had the best lesson regarding what is the dashboard, right? And again, as you said, Niko, we talked about purpose, we talked about contextual stuff. And immediately they revamped their mock ups, simplifying, saying, okay, that's probably something we always have to consider, and that's probably should have, could have nice to have, right? And with that again, going back, what's the job to be done? Are we on track? It's really helpful, and that's a valuable dashboard, so

Mark Richards: 38:38

I don't jump in on that one and and for me, it's probably the most important part about a dashboard being valuable is ownership, and it's one of the tricks of scale. Is with scale, you need consistency. And you know, the biggest complaint that I see when I talk to most organizations about their tool and these days, you know, is it JIRA? Is it Azure DevOps? It's kind of half and half now, and you know, it'll be one of three or four things plugged over the top of them, usually. But it doesn't matter which one it is. What most of them do is they go, we're not allowed to change anything about the configuration, right? There are standard things defined by our tooling team, and we can't change it. And, you know, that's probably the first thing is you've got to be able to lead into that and go, you've got some ability for people to take ownership. And, you know, I had this beautiful exercise where the client was actually, it was early last year. So we had two things happening in parallel. They were using that were zero DevOps. And, weirdly enough, Azure DevOps, if like, for me, I probably actually prefer Azure DevOps to JIRA these days. Don't ask me why. I couldn't explain it. But anyway, they had Azure DevOps, and it was all in a complete mess because they had every team had their own instance of it. They all used it their own unique way. There was no way that you could do any kind of aggreg. Scaling view across teams because of the way it was structured. So we had an expert in who was restructuring and migrating these or DevOps stuff and building a bunch of standard dashboards out for the teams to go with. You know, this is the way the consolidated view and configuration of all the data now, and these are the standard dashboards. And I was kind of excited, because the x excited, because the expert was taking everything from my metrics model and doing a little bit of tweaking for the context of the organization, and fundamentally building dashboards that align to my metrics model, plus pretty good looking cumulative flow diagrams, which is my favorite of all of the real charts. But on the same time, I was running a improvement card or series with the scrum master chapter, and in preparation for them having this, you know, brand new, beautiful area of cleanliness with Azure DevOps, we ran an improvement card with all the Scrum Masters about their ability to leverage metrics to help their teams. And they were all doing a lot of, you know, metrics in spreadsheets, metrics by survey, metrics by check in, but they were doing a lot of, how can metrics help us? Help our teams along the side? And then the two things kind of came together at the end. They got their new standard dashboards. They got their new beautiful cleaners who are DevOps, and they'd all learnt to think about the important metrics. And they all looked at the dashboards and went, these aren't the dashboards we want. And then they went through this bit of going, Okay, well, the handover, the handover from the expert, wasn't, here's how to use the dashboards I've just created for you, but it's here to out to create your own dashboards and share them between each other, and we still had the consistency, because they collectively as a chapter where we're going to make sure we're all using the same dashboard, but we're picking the data that excites us and helps us help our teams in our standard dashboard, and the energy and the change that happened out of that was phenomenal. So you know, yes, you need consistency. Yes, you need to tweak people and teach them in terms of what to look for, but give people the power to create their own dashboards and their own views and really take ownership of acting on the data and looking for the data that's going to help them act

Stephan Neck: 42:14

I highly second that mark. I highly second that because if you look at what we teach when it comes to compound systems, right? We have those prototypical compound systems. That's the starting point. And exactly what you just mentioned on an art level. Find out what your art topology requires you to do on that prototypical compound system, right? Like testing, what is implementing? What is integration? What does that mean for a platform art, it's totally different providing services and solutions for other arts. Then for the stream aligned art that is close to the operational live stream has a short time to market, stuff like that so highly second that what Mark just said on a team level, if it's related to what we'd concluded on an art level, let the teams find out. Right? Again, some, some teams might only use a column that says implementing, some say implementing. That doesn't create any data for us to improve over the time. So it's adults knowing what they do. Just engage them and find out. And by the way, if you have a JIRA administrator or a tool administrator, this guy is a servant of the teams and the odds, and not the other way around, right? So this, and I, normally, I try to find this administrators of the tools, bring them to the lace for the first PIs, and make them change their mind, becoming enablers and not inhibitors of the flow.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 44:00

I like this analogy, by the way, with JIRA, how many of you just took a JIRA board, how it's presented, and said that's now mine. And if you do the same with dashboard, dashboards, exactly the same wrong thing, it's really the JIRA board should help you the same with the dashboard. Should help you navigate, to help you communicate, should help you find the right conversations. And exactly, if you just take a classical JIRA board before, because, because safe says so, because your company is cool, say so, then you're doing wrong. Thank you very much. Stephan was one of my highlights.

Ali Hajou: 44:32

So that's that brings us, I think, to the topic of, you know, not doing all of this, not creating all of these dashboards yourself, but automating some of them, the tools that have been mentioned just now are, by the way, not sponsors of this

Unknown: 44:49

podcast, no shares.

Ali Hajou: 44:52

But you know, they these type of tools. They have all kind of pre defined reports, and let's say, pre. To find views that can be used to understand. You know, how are we doing? What are, what is the what's the progress? You know, any insights that we can derive from the data. So last question of today would be about automating insights. How would you do that, and where would you start? And I'll start with

Mark Richards: 45:25

with you. Mark, alright, so I, as soon as I during the prep, soon as I looked at this question, I had flashbacks to Japan and the number of lectures we had from the Toyota type people about how expensive automation is, and the fact that you have to consider the payback period of automation, and it's very easy to over automate and to actually suffer for it commercially. And it was like it did my head in because I've spent my life going automate, automate, automate. And they had this moment that when we were walking around the first Toyota factory. And of course, what they have is they have these little, I guess that they're like little trucks with trays on the back that move the goods around the factory and drop them off to restock the assembly line. So, you know, they load up a whole lot bunch of boxes on this trolley. It moves around in a predetermined route and drops those boxes off three stocks that are predetermined pace. And that's a lot of the efficiency of their flow of, you know, the just in time inventory sitting next to the assembly line. And when we're there, he shows us this one, and it's got a guy walking next to it, and then, and it's got another guy, actually. So there's two guys walking next to this trolley, and they're both interacting with it as it does things. And he goes, Oh, it's Kaizen Monday. And we said, What do you mean? He said, Okay, well, Monday is the first day that a lot of new Kaizen stuff kicks off. And what they've obviously done is decided to change something about the way this particular delivery cycle is working. And although that trolley is actually it's robotic, and with the appropriate, you know, configuration and programming, it actually doesn't need attendance. It will do the delivery cycle. It will drop the goods off automatically. It needs no intervention. But they've decided to change something, and what they're doing is, instead of starting with programming, they've got people walking with it, and they're manually making the changes to test how they work. And then after they've gone through a few cycles of going, Okay, this is what works properly with our new manual cycles, we'll go back and we'll do the work to automate it. And I think when it comes to things like dashboards, the instant you go hard after automation, you don't want to change it like because it's hard to change now, you've invested all this money in the automation, and you know, you might have hate for fought for priority, for funding, you name it, what can you do without making the investment in automation to Get to the data that actually helps you, and then plug the automation in afterwards. And it could be as simple as something like with, with, if you're using Azure DevOps, it's really easy to do Excel exports from Azure DevOps and hook up Power BI dashboards, and they're very lightweight. You can do it yourself. You can build Excel queries and excel views, and you can apply Excel transformations to the data before you ever go and negotiate for a change of configurations or DevOps. That's your lightweight stuff. And then you go, now, this is the thing we love, cool. Can we go back and we can do the work to actually bake it into our configuration? So that's me and automation, right? You guys. Niko, I see Yoda on your face. Yeah,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 48:44

yes, a young master, first master you must seek, then ultimate. So that's what came first in my mind. I see so many people try automate things, automate reports which they are the wrong or the wrong investment. So really, you first must know what you want to do. That's why I said, Yeah, imagine me. No, the voice first master, you must then ultimate.

Mark Richards: 49:06

I'll give a CEO voice. Come on. You can do it. I can't. I can't. There is no card.

Stephan Neck: 49:14

It's interesting. It's interesting. We're talking about automation. If you talk about automation, what springs to my mind is, what is quality, right? Again, have the discussion about quality, because automation is activity. Before I get active, I need to know, why should I do it again? The why I'm repeating myself and then having this collaboration about what is minimal requirement to achieve that? Again, Mark mentioned it on a team level. On an out level, has different flavors, even if you then aggregate on a portfolio level, different business units, enterprise level, these are the discussions we should trigger when it comes to automation, right? And this then ends. Up, finally, as a result, with dashboards, visualization, again, that's that's the cool stuff I like about automation. Because ask them people what automation is, you get 10 different answers. Okay, let's align. Let's find out what it is and how we should automate that it's really beneficial for whatever entity we are talking about, yeah, yeah.

Ali Hajou: 50:25

And it's, it does bring quite a lot of, how do you call it creativity, which I do like to see before you know it, Excel takes over, and everyone has their own little Excel charts that are updated for three sprints, and then after that, completely forgotten, so then obsolete. But I've seen, I've seen people make beautiful, really cool charts in Power BI, which, you know, if you're working in an environment that has, you know, the office 365 stack, you know, using Microsoft Teams, you can blend that into teams, into a circle team channel or whatever. It's pretty, pretty cool what you can do, pretty cool what you can do. So what also is pretty cool, and sort of one of the coolest thing of this podcast is, is to just reflect on this topic that we've been talking about for almost an hour now, using a completely different sort of angle and angle that is inspired by our one and only storytelling uncle. Niko, the question is, if these dashboards were a board game, what would they be and why? And I'll start with I'll start with you. Niko, yeah, it was so

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 51:35

easy to find the question, but so hard to find an answer. And then, after Fatih, with myself. I have chosen in Swiss German, in English, I found out the game is called battleship, so you have the opponents ship there, and you're on here and try to sink it. And why? Because I don't care if it's dashboard or not, because if it's a board game or not, it's something I need. So the one, one, the first point is, it's something I need, even it's maybe another dashboard board game, sorry. And the other thing is, it visualized exactly what I need, not more, not less. It fulfills a purpose. It visualizes what I need. That's why I've chosen battleship, even if it's maybe not a board game.

Ali Hajou: 52:20

Thank you. Niko, how about you? Stephan, I've

Stephan Neck: 52:23

chosen in English, it's part cheesy, the game of India. In German, it's Ali mittweiler, it's a game where you have four items. It's like tokens or like persons. You move them around the course, and you have to achieve a goal, you have to go home, or you have to go somewhere, and if you are overtaken by others on that game, you go back to square one. You lose, right? And I like this, this board game, because it's reflecting the balance between advancing quickly and also avoiding setbacks, right? So for me, dashboards is really, how are we advancing? How do we get the indication that there might be some setbacks? Because it we're always operating in a context, in an environment, and we're not alone.

Ali Hajou: 53:17

Nice, isn't that Ludo?

Stephan Neck: 53:20

Or at least, I think I don't know how you call it might be, it's in different countries, has different names, right? Does it

Mark Richards: 53:27

have, I didn't do the middle of the board that rolls the dice and like you click down on the dice, and then, no, no, does it? No, it's

Stephan Neck: 53:35

really, everyone rolls the dice and and according to your luck. You advance quickly or not, or you are even overtaken. And some of the spaces are like safe havens. If you are overtaken, you don't have to go home and start from scratch. And if you are on the blank field, if you are overtaken, you have to go back someone was faster.

Unknown: 53:56

See us next, safe summits, playing games. Yes,

Ali Hajou: 54:02

have about you, Mark?

Mark Richards: 54:04

So I'm about to change my answer. I will tell you, I reckon at some point, chat GPT is going to recognize when I'm asking it about Niko as jiggles, because it feels like every time there's a jiggle, I make up this crazy prompt, like the prompt today was, you know, what are 20 popular board games with strong analogies to human life and philosophy, and what is the underlying life analogy that the game is presenting? So that I could pick one?

Ali Hajou: 54:35

Oh, my God, that's what you write the chat GPT for this question. Absolutely

Mark Richards: 54:39

sophisticated. Wow. But actually, as we were talking, I came up with a much simpler answer. I'm going to go with snakes and ladders. And the reason I'm going to go with snakes and ladders is because when it comes to data and dashboarding, like you're trying to climb your way out. Up towards having better and better information that helps you steer and improve more and more effectively. But it's so easy when it comes to reporting and data, to make cultural mistakes, to make huge mistakes in terms of chasing the wrong data or using it the wrong way, and that's just going to send you all the way back down to the ground because you're going to ride the snake of your mistake.

Ali Hajou: 55:26

Nice, nice, nice, nice. I see the parallels amongst the games that all of you have chosen. I've chosen a slightly different approach. I actually I've looked at how dashboards are typically being criticized by people because there's, you know, whenever you present a dashboard, or whenever you start using a dashboard, there's always some people that are like, okay, but you know, where does this data come from? How do you measure this? What does this mean? And those kind of questions are essential in making sure that we are showing the right stuff, that we're reflecting on, the right stuff that we have the right indicators showing reality. So the game that I chose was, guess who? Which is a game that is typically played by two or more people. Everyone has a sort of a little deck with all types of little faces, but you cannot see from each other, which one each person has selected, but based on asking questions, you can sort of identify which of the puppets, which of the figures are not it. So you'll have to, you have to, you know, it's like,

Mark Richards: 56:38

are they wearing glasses? Do they have a handbag? Do they have red Exactly, yeah, exactly,

Ali Hajou: 56:43

yeah, yeah. So, you know, are we using the right data? Where does this come from? Who measures this? Is this data from all teams or just

Unknown: 56:53

a few? It's money in place.

Ali Hajou: 56:57

It does money, yeah, exactly. So I thought that was quite a fitting, fitting game. Um, moving to the last part, the last part of our today's session, which is, if we look at this topic, what would be your single one key takeaway, starting with Mark,

Mark Richards: 57:19

uh, one more change, bring better data. Nice. Thank

Ali Hajou: 57:23

you. Thank you. Niko,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 57:24

cool, mine is handle your dashboard, not like a pet, but like a navigation system.

Ali Hajou: 57:31

I need to think about the parallels amongst the two a pet and a navigation unless, unless you have a like a like a post. How do you call it post pigeon?

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 57:40

No, it's not like. It's something you only like and cuddle and oh, it's mine. It's so nice and like to play with. It should have also a purpose, have your navigation. That's why I've chosen this sentence, nice,

Ali Hajou: 57:53

nice, nice, nice. Thank you. Thank you. How about you? Stephan, Yeah,

Stephan Neck: 57:57

mine fits neatly into those two statements, the dashboards, reports and insights should serve as a real time guide, right? If you want to get better, you need this real time information. Yeah,

Ali Hajou: 58:09

yeah, and hanging on the word real that you just mentioned. Stephan, I have something very similar, actually. I think that information become insights when they're truthful and dependable people can depend on which I think there's a there's actually a lot of parallels in what we important in dashboards and insights, which I really liked. They're much appreciated to share your information, your data, which is basically your experiences that you've injected into this episode. And next week we're going to have the next episode, which will be about distributed pi planning, so, which is, think these days, pretty common, um, hosted by one and the only mark as our host of that episode. So for now, thanks for whomever has tuned in. Thank you for my mates in preparing this episode and sharing your insights and examples and jokes. And I'd like to say goodbye for today and see you back next time.

Mark Richards: 59:26

Thanks, Ali, great to have you with us for a change. Yes, yeah, globe trotting like after your life seems to be Yeah.