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, 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 takes place automatically with us and also indicates how long the retrospective lasted. - This way you can also remember conversations that may have been time-consuming in the meeting. In the end, the question is always: How long did the meeting last and what could I take away from 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 is 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 out here was very interesting:

You can probably already guess, but every character is different and there are some 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 talk to each participant for a minute at the end of the retro to get a feel for what a certain number actually means to that person. - The same also applies to different teams. Please do not use the Roti score to compare teams with each other, as there are so many parameters involved that you cannot 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 in their routine. And what you can quickly see here is that the first team gives an average of one whole point more than the second. The funny thing, however, is 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. - What you can really see with Team #2, however, 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. According to hundreds of interviews we conducted on the subject, the ROTI for this meeting is 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."
• "When 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:

Open template in 1:1 tool

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.

How to

Sailboat Retro ⛵️: How the retro works

1. Random Icebreaker (2-5 minutes)

   Echometer provides you with a generator for random check-in questions.

2. Review of open actions (2-5 minutes)

   Before starting with new topics, you should talk about what has become of the measures from past retrospectives to check their effectiveness. Echometer automatically lists all open action items from past retros.

3. Discuss retro topics

   Use the following open questions to collect your most important findings. First, everyone does it themselves, covered. Echometer allows you to reveal each column of the retro board individually in order to then present and group the feedback.

   • ⚓️ Your anchor: What holds us back?
   • 🦈🧊 Your shark/iceberg: Which dangers or obstacles approach us?
   • 💨 Your tailwind: What drives us forward?
   • 🏝💰 Your paradise: What achievement or milestones are we working towards?

4. Catch-all question (Recommended)

   So that other topics also have a place:

   • What else would you like to talk about in the retro?

5. Prioritization / Voting (5 minutes)

   On the retro board in Echometer, you can easily prioritize the feedback with voting. The voting is of course anonymous.

6. Define actions (10-20 minutes)

   You can create a linked action via the plus symbol on a feedback. Not sure which measure would be the right one? Then open a whiteboard on the topic via the plus symbol instead to brainstorm root causes and possible measures.

7. Checkout / Closing (5 minutes)

   Echometer enables you to collect anonymous feedback from the team on how helpful the retro was. This creates the ROTI score ("Return On Time Invested"), which you can track over time.

Sailboat Retro ⛵️

⚓️ Your anchor: What holds us back?

🦈🧊 Your shark/iceberg: Which dangers or obstacles approach us?

💨 Your tailwind: What drives us forward?

🏝💰 Your paradise: What achievement or milestones are we working towards?

Open this retro now