Better insights
The vast majority of nearly 800 CxO participants in our future enterprise survey experienced challenges in getting insight in the performance of their software development and DevOps teams. Most organizations have practices in place to help them to monitor and report on the performance, but this insight does not reach CxO level. What are the causes of this paradox and what can you do to align the insights in the organization to effective CxO information?
Insights in the teams
As you can see from the numbers there is a good chance that your development and DevOps teams are using at least one of the top 4 practices to monitor performance. What we encounter in practice is that the way these practices are implemented is either not consistent over all development and DevOps teams or inconsistent in a way that is prone to be influenced by personal judgment or taste. When you have implemented code quality management tools like SonarQube, Checkstyle or FindBugs, but have no rules on how these tools should be used, how do you know what the quality of the software is that your teams are developing or maintaining? If you don’t use it consistently throughout your whole application portfolio, how do you know where to direct improvement attention?
Team productivity is quite often determined based on DORA or Flow. These types of metrics are ideal on a team level to help the teams improve, but are not suitable for CxO level decisions because they have no consistent meaning beyond the team level.
IDC is all about data. With our KPI model, we can help you determine the right dataset you need to make fact-based decisions to direct teams to bring value to your organization. When you are already a value-driven organization, IDC can tie the right KPI’s to your objectives and key results. With an assessment of your data in your tools we can help you piece the right data together or we can help you fill the gaps based on best practices.
Examples of real insight
Some examples of real insight that we have helped set up for some of our customers:
- Output of the teams. How much software are they producing, compared to similar teams in similar companies, based on standardized sizing metrics. This is real management information on top of the DORA, Flow and happiness metrics for the teams themselves.
- Estimation erosion. When internal team processes evolve, so do internal estimates. Improved internal processes are not always reflected in more value per sprint. By comparing the internal metrics to standardized metrics you can determine whether estimation is improving or eroding.
- Code analysis at system or portfolio level. Almost half of the organizations we interviewed are using automated code quality management tools. Most of these tools are limited to establishing the code quality of an individual piece of code. Code analysis at system or portfolio level looks deeper or wider, also taking account of the quality of the total code base. This can bring to light risks in your code base of interactions between individual pieces of code or of bad updating practices for open source components that are used in your code base.
- Insight in the real Bill of IT. All IT costs, including cloud spent, can be mapped towards the right value stream.
Better decisions
By comparing the real insights from your company to the insights we have from our IDC global market data, we can give you insight into how you compare to similar organizations. By comparing like for like we show you the differences between you and your peers. With this information you can make fact-based decisions on whether or not you need to change something. Our insight can help you make better decisions in cooperation with external service providers, make better sourcing decisions, make better decisions on how to set up your IT organization, how to create more value or to transform your application landscape.
Better outcomes
What we see with all of our clients is that better informed decisions lead to better outcomes. Examples of those better outcomes are:
To learn more about how IDC can help you and get connected with someone on our team, click the button below.
