Learn how Evidence-Based Management (EBM) from Scrum.org helps agile teams maximise value delivery through data, goals, and continuous improvement.
Evidence-Based Management (EBM) is a framework developed by Scrum.org that helps organisations make better decisions through data and empiricism.
In this post, we’ll explore the core elements of EBM and how it can drive continuous improvement and business value.
1. Purpose of EBM
EBM helps organisations improve decision-making by using evidence and empiricism rather than assumptions or gut feeling.
It focuses on measuring value delivered, not just activity or outputs.
Supports continuous improvement towards better business outcomes to achieve strategic goals.
2. Key Value Areas (KVAs)
There are four areas EBM define organisation's ability to deliver value.
Current Value (CV)
Measures the value delivered to customers and stakeholders today.
Focuses on customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, revenue per customer, etc.
Unrealised Value (UV)
Assesses the potential value that could be realised in the future.
Looks at market opportunities, customer needs not yet met.
Ability to Innovate (A2I)
Measures how well the organisation can deliver new capabilities that might better meet customer needs.
Affected by factors such as technical debt, time spent on maintenance, and non-value adding activities like rework or excess manual effort.
Extensive long-term support and backward compatibility can also negatively impact an organisation's ability to innovate.
Time to Market (T2M)
Evaluates the organisation’s ability to quickly deliver new value.
Metrics include cycle time, lead time, throughput, release frequency, defect density etc.
T2M metrics needs to be defined clearly and measured visibly to guide improvement decisions.
These areas provide a way of assessing and uplifting organisational capabilities for continuous innovation.
3. Goals
EBM has a 3-tiered approach to goal-setting; immediate, intermediate, and strategic.
Immediate: Short-term goals, from a week to a month down the road. If you're familiar with Scrum, these are your sprint goals.
Intermediate: Product goals that we want to achieve in the medium term.
Strategic: If you are working with a portfolio of products, these are the goals that inform product goals.
What do these goals have in common?
They are clear, outcome-based goals.
They all can change in order to remain competitive.
Data and insights are crucial to inspect and adapt toward those goals.
They are all interconnected and help guide investment and improvement decisions at different levels of organisations.
The Experiment Loop and the Goals
4. Empiricism
Empiricism is the foundation of EBM, and it supports reaching strategic goals through experiment, inspect, and adapt cycles.
Inspection of the experiments should reveal evident results, based on collected data and insights. Leveraging data visualisation / BI tools such as PowerBI, Tableau, or Atlassian Analytics help measure progress, forecast delivery, and improve continuously.
5. Focus on Outcomes Over Outputs
Shift from measuring things like number of story points completed or features delivered to:
How much value was created?
How did the outcome change customer behaviour or satisfaction?
Conclusion
EBM offers a comprehensive perspective and a lightweight but effective structure to make data-informed decisions in complex, rapidly changing environments.
Whether you're a leader, Scrum Master, or an Agile Coach, if you are looking for a different perspective for building resilient teams and organisations, evaluating your organisation through EBM lens can spark great ideas.
