The company I work for just started the process of completely reworking how the development team's impact/effectiveness is measured (along with each member of the team as you would imagine), so your comment really peaked my interest.
What did you end up measuring? How did you measure it? We've been debating for the last few days on how to measure the outputs and their real business impact without getting caught up measuring the inputs that may or may not really matter (commits, loc, story points, etc...).
For context this is an org that has been, historically, in the dysfunctional area of the operating spectrum, high employee churn, lots of technical debt, no testing to speak of in flagship product, high concentrations of knowledge held by single individuals.
We have somewhat coalesced around the idea of dynamically assigning business impact metrics on a per feature/product basis (if we build this thing we would expect to see metric x, y, z go in said direction). In addition to those metrics we are thinking of also doing something along the lines of an NPS (net promoter score) score that would be given to the feature/product by the end-user. Taking both of these into account would then score the development teams effectiveness/impact.
In addition to the outputs mentioned above we would also be tracking the inputs, but more as a historical data set, to see if there are any correlations between our inputs (commits, loc, story points, etc...) to better NPS and business impact metrics.
I'd love to hear any feedback, experiences, advice.
P.S. Team size is 10 devs, core team of 4 in U.S.A co-located, all others remote international.
> For context this is an org that has been, historically, in the dysfunctional area of the operating spectrum, high employee churn, lots of technical debt, no testing to speak of in flagship product
> P.S. Team size is 10 devs, core team of 4 in U.S.A co-located, all others remote international.
My advice would be to bring in a good dev manager and stay away from trying to narrowly define dev productivity metrics.
A good dev manager will be able to bring you up to average and fix the obvious problems.
If you are part of a larger company then the business side is probably using OKRs (objective-key results) or something similar to track at a higher level. Start looking at and making sure your team is contributing to these.
As a senior manager your teams self-assigned dev metrics are meaningless to me. It's not going to be enough to justify more staff, pay rises, different work, etc.
What did you end up measuring? How did you measure it? We've been debating for the last few days on how to measure the outputs and their real business impact without getting caught up measuring the inputs that may or may not really matter (commits, loc, story points, etc...).
For context this is an org that has been, historically, in the dysfunctional area of the operating spectrum, high employee churn, lots of technical debt, no testing to speak of in flagship product, high concentrations of knowledge held by single individuals.
We have somewhat coalesced around the idea of dynamically assigning business impact metrics on a per feature/product basis (if we build this thing we would expect to see metric x, y, z go in said direction). In addition to those metrics we are thinking of also doing something along the lines of an NPS (net promoter score) score that would be given to the feature/product by the end-user. Taking both of these into account would then score the development teams effectiveness/impact.
In addition to the outputs mentioned above we would also be tracking the inputs, but more as a historical data set, to see if there are any correlations between our inputs (commits, loc, story points, etc...) to better NPS and business impact metrics.
I'd love to hear any feedback, experiences, advice.
P.S. Team size is 10 devs, core team of 4 in U.S.A co-located, all others remote international.