An interesting statement I have heard recently in one of the organizations that I have been working with is that some of the agile processes that we are implementing are not quanitfiably better than the traditional processes they had before. This seemed to be the motivation for not moving the new process to the rest of the organization or expanding it.

They would say, “the team seems to be happier than they were before but the improvement is not quanitifiable and until we can quantify it on paper we cannot make any further changes”.

Up till recently I thought this was a problem until it dawned on me that their existing system was not being quantified, meaning even if I managed to quantify what we were doing (which I can), what would we be comparing it to?

An appropriate response to someone when they give this reasoning is - "That's a very good point, let's go over the quantifiable attributes of your existing processes and see if we can get some common metric that we can compare them on?"

If they then are able to produce some quantifiable metrics, you win because you now have something to compare it to, and if they don't then you can politely point the logic of that out as well.