Responses to Making Metrics Work Questions, Part 2
This is the second part of a two part review of questions asked during a recent webcast on Making Metrics Work. The first part is here.
Q: Todd ran through some interesting metrics. What are the most impactful 2nd generation metrics an IT dept. can start with?
As we discussed during the event, a key characteristic of a 2G metrics program is selecting a small number of highly meaningful metrics to track. Measuring for the sake of doing so is costly and it leads to thrashing and poor decision-making. With that said, one of the foundational metrics of a 2G program is tracking the investment profile--understanding where effort is being expended and whether or not that aligns to priorities and expectations. Time equals investment and every investment has a direct and an opportunity cost. So it is important to know where time is being spent across your teams, activities and project portfolio. Of course this is probably not the only metric you'll want to track. Many organizations combine the sort of activity-based data we create with outcomes-related data, such as defects open/closed and code check-ins. Together, this provides a complete view into productivity. There are certainly other metrics that organizations will want to track, but it is difficult to generalize because they're often unique to the circumstances and context of an organization. For example, many organizations closely track test and quality metrics as a basis for understanding the state and status of their projects.
Q: Question on effective deployment of this. In what part of the organization does this product typically reside, and do you believe it matters? PMO leaders? CTO?
6th Sense Analytics is used by a broad range of stakeholders and delivers unique value to each. For example:
- Developers -- 6th Sense Analytics provides individual developers visibility into their own work patterns and provides a basis for comparison against the overall developer community. This enables developers to become more reflective about their own work patterns and provides a basis for self management and self improvement. 6th Sense also allows developers to generate a personal report that they can bring to daily standup meetings and other progress checkpoints as a basis for discussing their areas of focus. Developers also have the ability to look at aggregated team-level data as a basis for self organization and helping to identify opportunities and risks.
- Development Managers -- 6th Sense Analytics provides aggregated views that managers use as a basis for understanding where investments are being made across distributed development teams. Typically, development managers look at aggregated data to understand both the investment profile and the blend and sequence of development activity--to ensure alignment to process and best practices. They also use 6th Sense for proxy-based estimation, using Active Time as a measure of scope and as a velocity measure to create a highly precise estimate.
- VP/Development Director/CTO -- These stakeholders use 6th Sense is similar ways to the development manager but, more often than not, they're looking at more abstracted data; they're less focused on the detail of the project and more interested in seeing patterns, trends and early warning into high priority areas of a process. They also like the idea that 6th Sense reveals the processes that are being followed and provides a basis for both the adherence to best practices as well as the creation of new best practices--relating a development pattern to a great outcome, for example.
- PMO -- Project managers use 6th Sense as a basis for in-process visibility into tasks and other work items. Particularly when estimations are done in Active Team, project managers have a highly accurate and up-to-date measure of the level of completion of tasks--all without delay, manual data collection and reliance on incomplete or inaccurate data.
Previous Post:
Responses to Making Metrics Work Questions, Part 1
