You can’t manage what’s not measured
The start of a new year is an excellent time to take stock of where you and your team are at. You can look at how your environment, systems, and processes are set up. You can re-evaluate business objectives. Consider where you stand and where you want to go this year. As a leader, don't do this alone. Involve your team in the assessment and the planning.
One of the best tools for evaluation is a review of any long-term metrics you've been tracking. Some teams use DORA metrics to check their software delivery performance. Others use the SPACE framework for understanding developer productivity. Regardless of the framework, or the actual numbers, our advice is simple:
- Decide what is important for you to track
- Discover the relevant current conditions
- Track those metrics over time
- Pay attention to trends, not points-in-time
This last point is vital. Is deploy time getting longer or shorter? How about the time to consider work done? Or time spent on correcting failure demand? The trend can teach us where the team is at, how team morale is, and what we should focus our attention on.
The next step is to make one small change and then go back to monitoring how it is tracking. Smaller changes are easier than big ones. If we aim to for incremental improvements, success is only a small step away.