ROTI or "Return On Time Invested" as an agile metric
Which Agile Coach or Scrum Master doesn’t know it. The participants in the retrospectives or other meetings leave the impression that the time outside the meeting is better invested than in the meeting itself. But to make the meetings worthwhile, you need to be able to clearly identify when participants like the meetings and when they like them less. And that’s exactly what the roti score (return on time invested) is for.
Roti (return on time invested) briefly explained:
What is Roti (retun on time invested)?
Roti, or the Roti Score, is a subjective metric that indicates how good it felt to spend time in a meeting or activity.
Or more simply: If you think a meeting is very productive for the time it took, then it has a high Roti-Score. If the meeting was more like “well”, then it gets a rather low Roti-Score.
As you can see in this picture, it happens automatically for us and also indicates how long the retrospective lasted. - This helps you remember any forgotten conversations that may have become time-wasters in the meeting. In the end, the question is always: How long did the meeting last and what did I get out of it?
For example, if 5 people participated in the retro and gave the following roti scores (5,7,7,8,8) then you can determine the average value here ((5+7+7+8+8)/5 = 7) and then get the average roti score.
This is the right way to work with the Roti-Score (return on time invested):
At this point, I would like to give you an interesting insight into the interpretation of the Roti-Score. Because believe me, working well with key figures is anything but easy.
Now let’s take our example result (5,7,7,8,8) through our roti query again.
What can be interpreted from this? - Nothing!
Yes, it’s true that one person gave it a “5”, but that doesn’t mean he really thought the retro was worse than someone who gave it a 7.
Sounds illogical at first, but with subjective perception, it’s a fatal mistake to compare different people with each other. - For example, I myself have developed this key figure with various teams, and what I found here was extremely interesting:
You might already guess it, but every character is different and there are those for whom a “7” in the Roti score is already a rather bad retro, and those for whom everything above “5” is an absolute success. And that’s exactly why I also like to spend a minute with each participant at the end of the retro to get a feel for what a certain number actually means to that person. - The same applies to different teams, by the way. Please don’t use the Roti score to compare teams with each other, as there are so many parameters involved here that you can’t say whether an “8” for one team is now better, the same or even worse than a “7” for the other team.
But now let’s take a look at what interesting information can be gleaned from the Roti-Score.
How do the team and the individual team players develop?
As you can see in this image, we measure the Roti score in each retro and can really see long-term trends in the teams. Here, for example, we can see that the team is already so well-rehearsed that we can deliver a pretty stable performance and are always around a 9/10.
In the second picture, on the other hand, you can see a team that has only recently established retrospectives as part of their routine. And what you can quickly see here is that the first team awards an average of one whole point more than the second. The funny thing is, however, that the phenomenon mentioned above actually occurs here, that the retros are not actually running worse, but team #2 is simply a little more conservative with the scoring. - However, what you can really see with team #2 is that the retros are perceived as somewhat less valuable from month to month. The “return on time invested” is decreasing.
From here on, the real magic begins: because now you have to find out what caused Team #2 to see a downward trend.
Spoiler: The duration of the retrospectives has increased. - So it seems that the increasing duration of the retros for team #2 is causing the return on time invested to decrease.
Important: This is first a hypothesis, which again needs to be tested. So we have concluded in the team to restrict the meeting time and will see in the coming retros what effect it will have on the Roti score.
Using this method, we at Echometer have already analyzed a total of more than 30,000 retrospectives from more than 100 companies and have been able to make incredibly interesting observations.
One example is that most retrospectives are held on a Wednesday, although the Roti score is highest on Fridays:
If you are interested in the evaluation and the resulting learnings, feel free to read our article: “ Analysis of 30k retros: 4 tips for agile teams %E2%80%9D
For managers: ROTI of 1-to-1 meetings
Many managers conduct regular one-on-one meetings with their employees - but don’t get everything out of the conversations. Based on hundreds of interviews we’ve conducted on the topic, the ROTI for this meeting tends to be rather low.
I would therefore like to take this opportunity to draw your attention to our 1:1 meeting tool Echometer (see website). It combines short Health Check surveys with an AI assistant that makes employee development much easier.
The following template will give you a feel for what kind of questions you can reflect on and measure with Echometer in your 1-to-1 meetings. Try it out using the button without login:
⁉️ Mood check (Agreement from 1-7): Personal development
- "My work tasks usually progress very quickly, even if external feedback is necessary."
- "If I observe suboptimal behavior, I know how to constructively point it out to colleagues."
- "I receive constructive Feedback on both my work and my personal development."
- "I see an attractive career path ahead of me in the company." #Growth
- "In the last few weeks, I have very often been able to use my Strengths at work."
This is what this survey looks like in Echometer:
Conclusion on Roti (Return on time invested)
I hope I could give you a little more clarity in dealing with the Roti-Score with this article.
However, if you don’t feel like tracking the Roti-Score or the many other metrics that give you more insight into your teams and their development opportunities, then feel free to try out Echometer. You can test the tool completely free of charge and get a simple overview of, for example, the Roti-Score and many other key figures without additional effort.
Sailboat Retro ⛵️
