MuleSoft Catalyst — C4E
MuleSoft C4E Playbook — Measure Impact
And so we come to the end of the articles looking at the MuleSoft Centre for Enablement playbook with the last article on the final stage in the playbook, Measure Impact. This stage is broken down in the playbook to three activities:
· Gather Feedback for Existing Assets
· Measure C4E KPIs
· Develop C4E Improvement Recommendations
I will be looking at the business context of the Centre 4 Enablement playbook in upcoming articles so its important to remember that the articles that I have written up to now, including this article, have been examining the content of the Centre for Enablement playbook with occasional insights into its application. Let’s now think about the last activities in this playbook starting with gathering feedback for existing assets.
Gather Feedback for Existing Assets
In previous article I have touched on the topic of feedback but here we need to be looking at what has already been delivered but also looking forward to the future by determining the appetite and direction of what is still to be delivered. I have always stated that the C4E, in my view, has three major responsibilities, the operation of governance at a design and code level, the development of foundational and reusable assets and the evangelisation of the C4E, the assets that are currently available and the plan of what is yet to come. So, gathering feedback is not, as some may think, entirely focussed on getting people’s opinions on what the C4E has done so far. I think that one of the key aspects that all IT organisations need to keep at the top of their minds is that IT, while it may have its own goals, is at the end of days here to support the business and is one of the keys tools that any organisation has to meet its business objectives.
In order to meet business expectation, outcomes, goals and drive commercial innovation the IT organisation must seek to understand what benefit the assets they have delivered so far have produced, such as the reduction in time and cost of development through the reuse of foundational assets, the contribution that processes and procedures have made such as the reduction of bugs found in code, operational efficiency or increase in quality of delivery and this can only be achieved through actively seeking feedback. Before we take a look at forward facing feedback lets just see how we can get the feedback on existing assets.
Now it’s vital, at this time, to remember that the assets the C4E have produced are not all visible on MuleSoft Exchange, although a lot of them are. Where reusable assets have been documented in MuleSoft Exchange in the form of API’s, Connectors, templates etc. then the C4E should encourage, through as many channels they can find, feedback though the mechanisms that have been provided in Exchange. Each individual asset is capable of recording star ratings and reviews in pretty much the same way that other sites on the internet can gather reviews for the products they sell. The C4E must make regular checks on the reviews left to ensure that this feedback is seen, reviewed and acted upon. Not acting on reviews and comment left is the quickest way of ensuring that this feedback loop will dry up and die!
Whilst feedback is important, feed forward is also incredibly useful and will contribute to the C4E’s product backlog of assets and products that they can produce to support future facing business goals. In the same way people seeing the evangelisation, reusing existing assets and engaging with the current catalogue of assets will get a vision of the possibilities that they may not have seen before. In this way business problems and capabilities that the developers and the business users thought could never be resolved can suddenly become a path that is possible to follow. This may generate new thoughts, products and ways of working which in turn will provide the ‘feed forward’ ideas that the C4E can act upon.
Measure C4E KPIs
Having spent time at the start of setting up the C4E determining the KPI’s by which the C4E would be measured now is the time to look at those measurements. While this is a critical activity it is possible that a lot of the details required to gather the information to support the measurement of the KPI’s will require a significant amount of manual effort. Beware and take note — while trying to identify meaningful KPI’s by which the C4E can be measured also give great consideration to what needs to be measured, how it needs to be measured, what type of measurement is required and how the data can be automatically acquired, collated and presented. You may wish to engage the services of a Data Analyst and someone familiar with presenting data in a graphical and meaningful way!
Within the Anypoint Platform, an expansive API Developer Portal is available, facilitating the retrieval and analysis of metrics. Moreover, the Metric Toolkit offers a wealth of metrics garnered from the platform, which can be seamlessly integrated with other tools that may be available within the organisation.
Spending time defining these KPI’s and how they will be collected will pay dividends as the C4E matures.
Do it right or do it twice — you can choose.
Develop C4E Improvement Recommendations
If the C4E is to continue to be relevant in the long term then not only does it need to review and change itself to move with the changing direction of the business, it needs to develop, action and monitor an improvement plan and associate this with a product backlog of assets that either requirement improvement or require development. No business that has a long-term future will stand still and the more that the C4E can productionise the building blocks to develop and support the business requirements the more it will contribute to the overall success not only of the C4E but the business as a whole.
And we’re out.
As I said previously the last four years of my working life have been taken up with selecting and implementing MuleSoft and in particular the C4E for my organisation. This is obviously an ongoing mission and now being two years into operation there have been lessons learned and hopefully more to come. But for these articles I will now return to the start and look at the Business Outcomes Playbook so I hope you have found these articles helpful and I hope you follow me for the next chapter.
