At this stage in a software organizations maturity, the team has most of its ducks in a row and can focus on development optimizations that further accelerate reaction time to new requirements. Rather than waiting weeks to execute, teams are more flexible and agile in supporting ever-evolving business needs. Every technology organization should strive to reach this “nirvana” step in the success ladder, where they can more effectively drive change programs such as zero waste, zero defects, or even the migration from waterfall to agile development. To execute on these transformations, technology leaders need accurate, timely KPIs that track whether their initiatives are successfully speeding the pace of innovation.
For instance, by reviewing project retrospectives when a project is completed or the quarter closes, you can see how you’ve done across the full range of development success measures and continue to tweak your approach based on lessons learned at the efficiency and reliability stages. Find out how code quality measured up to the goals you set, calculate how much time and money went into delivering a new application, compare the average developer’s productivity against similar initiatives at your company, or benchmark your average development cycle time.
Organizations that reach the top level of software development maturity find that they’ve changed the entire conversation inside IT, and with partners across the business. They’re innovating with optimum efficiency and reliability, and are aligning around the right strategic priorities because everyone shares a common vocabulary and a single source of truth.
What are some examples of metrics that highly evolved velocity software teams monitor?
- Speed as measured by logic points per person week
- Planned vs unplanned requirements
- Requirement complexity
- Defect reaction time
- Code test coverage
- Milestone adherence
Final recommendations
Code+people analytics from Seerene can play an important role in helping you drive software development success, because they tell the story of where you are — and where you are going — in a whole new way. You simply can’t keep dozens and dozens projects running smoothly and producing results unless you have the ability to view your entire application portfolio on one dashboard with fact-based KPIs about your code and your engineering resources. With access to holistic, consistent metrics across all projects, teams, and applications, you can prioritize and make the case for investments with ease, standardize around best practices, and get early trouble warnings.
In summary, proactively managing your technology investment mix requires some key insights across your portfolio. At a high level, these should inform strategies such as:
- Watching where your money and development calories are going, and making adjustments regularly to align with strategic priorities
- Setting your organization’s software development “dials” by translating strategy into measurable targets that teams can report on and monitor over time
- Finding opportunities to drive faster results (e.g. by addressing productivity drains and your biggest risks), and reacting to business requirements with agility
As you take a more methodical, forward-looking (vs. reactive, exception-focused) approach to managing software, you’ll reap huge rewards. By comparing KPIs across people and initiatives, you and your teams will be able to make faster, better-informed decisions and even share progress at the board level. Once you have a system where every layer of the organization — from development, to dev ops, to operations and executives — is aligned around a consistent set of metrics (yet metrics that make sense for each group), you’ll rapidly climb the ladder towards becoming a highly efficient, productive, reliable, and innovative software organization.
