An agile score card is a great way to identify where to direct effort toward improving yourself or your team. The score card illustrates trends and helps when you just don’t know where to start.

Since the values within the score card are purely anecdotal in nature, it would be inappropriate for this to be used as a management metric. The score card is best used as a personal artifact for personal & team performance goal setting.

This Page is Work in Progress

Structure

This is one way of structuring your score card. This list is presented in no particular order. If this works for you or if you have any suggestions, please leave a comment below.

Items

Severity

• A – Excellent, Everything is going great!
• B – OK
• C – Improving
• D – Steady state. No changes.
• E – Progress declining.
• F – Fire! Flames! Help!

Priority

• 5 – Very Important
• 4
• 3
• 2
• 1 – Least Important

Example

In this example, we the beginnings of a heat map of your team’s score for multiple items along with what you consider both the burning issues and the issues that you consider acceptable.

When looking at this, it’s important to acknowledge that this is just the perspective of a small number of people. If you ask someone else within the same team, or outside the team, to perform this exercise — you will get different results.

Even with just three weeks of data, trends are starting to emerge.

• Deployment – There’s no change here but it’s not a priority. Why is it not a priority?
• Feedback – Feedback was a sore point for two weeks but was considered a priority. After those two weeks, the feedback cycle improved and we can focus on something else
• Working Product & High Work in Progress – Both of these areas seem to mirror each other. Are they related?
• Priority – Nothing has been scored an “A”. Why is this? Is it that nothing is perfect or is it acknowledgement that there’s always room for improvement?

Can you derive other observations from this data?