How to show Agile coaches improve ROI

What does it mean to succeed? How do we define success? How can we measure the success of our involvement with the Teams we work with? What are some metrics we can use?

Do we measure things indirectly (qualitative) or directly (quantitative)?
Do we measure trends or absolute numbers? -> trends give us more flexibility to monitor our progress.
What are the common metrics we measure on other projects? Does Agile impact them?

Metric Candidates
Mean time to success\release
Mean time between build failures
Mean time between Sprint terminations
Cost savings
Reduced risk (Waltzing with Bears has chapters to quantify risk)
Revenue produced sooner or earlier -> consider ongoing revenue and revenue not lost as well
Productivity increase (measured through function points)

Are we helping or hurting the Team? Would the Team pay for our services? If so, how much?
We want to consider the opportunity costs associated with Agile and want to change our perspective that labor is seen as a human capital investment.
Did we make the people better (is there anything which can show this - turnover rate)?

To show our improvement, we need to create visibility and interactions at multiple levels.
What are the results we want (write them down and keep a record throughout the year)? Does Agile get us to them faster?
Important to resolve problems that Agile exposes in order to get successes we want.

David J Anderson has a blog on this topic.
He has four principles of Agile management.
1) Focus on quality
2) Reduce Work-In-Progress?
3) Prioritize
4) Balance demand against capacity