Last week I did a three part series on metrics for ALL THE DIGITALZ. Metrics are like anything else: people say your metrics are terrible if they don’t like them, but they tend to like their metrics.
Ultimately, if you’re changing how a large organization works, you have to “manage by metrics.” You also need to manage by “talking to people and thinking for yourself.” I mean, if you’re transforming a large organization YOU NEED EVERY THING THAT’S HELPFUL THAT YOU CAN GET YOUR HANDS ON.
Here’s the three types of metrics I went over.
Business Metrics
Are we achieving the non-IT goals we’re here for? How would we know?
They’re metrics like:
- sales/workflow completion
- adoption
- awareness
- cost per transaction
- customer experience and satisfaction
For an indirect tracker, some people at TD Ameritrade come up with a way to track business value progress, i.e., “are we progressing at improving things?” by using # of apps deployed on the new cloud native platform (Tanzu Application Service, but you could use “kubernetes”) in dev and then prod. Their reasoning is good:
DevOps/Technical Metrics
Traditional development and ops metrics.
Metrics like:
- deployment frequency
- lead time for changes
- time to restore service
- change failure rate
There are mostly from the DevOps reports and little bit of SRE. There’s more SRE “golden metrics” that are interesting to contemplate. And the thinking behind “negotiating” error budgets between dev and ops (SRE) is probably a helpful way to think about SLAs (yes, yes – I know – DO NOT EMAIL ME).
Culture Metrics
How do you measure the state of your organization, the people in it and how they’re operating – “culture.”
These are much more squishy, but you can start with:
- Employee NPS (eNPS)
- Staff belief in leaders, mission, and strategy (do they understand strategy enough to do the right thing?)
- Staff retention and churn rate
More
There’s some interesting metrics commentary/survey work in a recent VMware sponsored survey:
If you prefer, all of this is written up in a guest column, but in a more serious, no-jokes way and with much less of my face. They’re also written up extensively in my books The Business Bottleneck and Monolithic Transformation.
