In this episode of LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, Derek Huether and Dave Prior take on the topic of Leading and Lagging Indicators. During the podcast they discuss how Key Performance indicators can help guide you towards an understanding of what to track with the expectation that it will create a certain result in the future (leading indicators), and what to measure in order to confirm if that result has in fact occurred (lagging indicators).

One example they touch on in the podcast is:  if you are trying to lose weight, tracking things like how much you exercise and how many calories you are consuming each day are leading indicators because it is reasonable to expect that if you are exercising regularly and limiting your caloric intake, that these actions could result in you losing weight. This is a way of tracking the actions you are taking to in order to bring about a desired change. But, we still need a way to confirm if the desired result has actually occurred. The only way you will know if you have actually lost weight, is to climb up on the scale and check your weight. That is a lagging indicator because it confirms whether or not the actions you took had resulted in the desired outcome.

Audio Version Only:

Links

If you’d like to learn more about Leading and Lagging Indicators, check out Derek’s recent blog post on the topic here: https://www.leadingagile.com/2018/02/leading-lagging-indicators/

Contacting Derek

If you’d like to contact Derek you can reach him at:

LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/derek-huether/

If you’d like to contact Dave you can reach him at:

LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/

And if you are interested in taking one of our upcoming Certified Scrum Master or Certified Scrum Product Owner classes, you can find all the details at https://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/