3 things to measure now
I’m not going to dispute Measure what Matters. Salient, helpful (and a fun read IMHO). I am, however, going to add another dimension that we found to be critical when we started our hybrid cloud journey: measure what you can when you can.
Sam (remember her and some of her recent challenges to show what she’s made of?) needs to demonstrate progress to her boss and her big boss. To help with this, she could take any of the following actions:
A. Return that call from the highly-sought-after consultant, so they can help her organization collect various metrics from the metrics brief the consultant provided. This will be the best way to show high-quality, meaningful metrics for their progress over time and not disrupt her team.
B. Redirect some of her internal team to gather all the metrics in the consultant’s list. These have to be the right things to track and she’s not in a position to afford any more consultants.
C. Find out from her team what she can measure that matters today and will resonate with her boss and big boss. Then, she can iterate with her team to measure things that will drive the behaviors to influence the cultural changes at the same time.
Much to the dismay of the consultant, Sam has the bias towards action. Rather than fighting with procurement and legal on terms of a new statement of work, she went with option C.
What did we do? We found that key metrics like “how much” and “how many” were important to getting the attention of the senior executives. For us, that was how much money were we able to save with our new approach and how many applications had we migrated.
We realized two things:
First, while it was minimal effort to collect early metrics that registered with the executives, those same metrics didn’t drive the behaviors from the teams on the ground. The teams on the ground understood implicitly that we wanted to move applications in the best, modern, cloud-native way and not simply lift and shift. So, a focus on hybrid “healthy” was necessary.
Second, the phrase “cost optimization” to the team resulted in some negative psychological impact. They were concerned that this would mean that they would be asked (i.e., told) to reduce resources on the team as a result. This was not the intent — we needed resources on the team to be able move faster, so it was essential to track a set of key metrics for the team that would drive them to use the new platform. In our case, we looked for an increase in the number of deployments.
With what we learned and to the point of this post — here’s the summary of what you can likely measure now as you start your journey:
- Overall progress — how many of your workloads have moved to the platform?
- Cost optimization — how much more efficient are you getting at running applications on the new platform?
- Speed — how much faster are you able to deliver business capabilities as a result of using agile, DevSecOps, containerized development on your hybrid cloud platform?
Until next time.
Matt Lyteson is Vice President of CIO Hybrid Cloud Platforms at IBM based in RTP, North Carolina. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
