As IT departments align with business priorities, CIOs need to make fact-based decisions fast.
Metrics, properly defined, can deliver tremendous value to IT organizations, aiding them in increasing efficiency and effectiveness. The challenge is in the definition, and in selecting a handful of metrics that can deliver maximum payback. The risk with metrics is that organizations will spiral into analysis paralysis – capturing information on everything and gaining nothing. Based on discussions with customers and a review of research from various sources, MKS has provided a framework and prescriptive advice for metrics effectiveness.
 "MKS Integrity allows us to establish standardized processes and tools across our distributed teams and locations. This will ultimately aid in our compliance efforts, but more importantly, it makes our development process more efficient and our staff more productive." -Jefferey McIntyre, Vice President, Technology Services, BNSF |
Team Efficiency – Essentially this is a measure for productivity (output / time) which is most valuable when trended across projects and over a reasonable time period but also useful within the phases of a project
Process Efficiency – Continual improvement being the goal here, measures track and report on the health of your internal processes. Are you spending too much time doing rework? Are too many bugs being found during initial QA, perhaps pointing to inefficient design and code reviews? How often did the scope of the project change? How did project milestones map to ideals (in terms of % of total project)?
Project Efficiency – How well did the project satisfy its objectives? This category takes into account project variances (schedule, budget, effort) as well as customer satisfaction metrics. Overlapping with Process Efficiency and Quality as well, Project Efficiency can also track metrics after the project is complete (i.e. defects found during first 30-90 days after implementation).
Quality – This can be a pure measure of defects / unit of output (function, LOC, etc.), by project or by phase, but can also include QA and testing metrics. Additionally, metrics can be generated to measure individual or team re-work (ie how many iterations of development, testing or deployments have occurred).
Value and Effectiveness – A measure of how the project and the output from the project aligns to the strategic objectives.
These measures are important when prioritizing projects and tracking the success of a project back to the core business objectives. Concrete metrics may be difficult to define for these categories but often educated assigned measures will be good enough.
The MKS approach to Portfolio Management provides CIOs with a holistic view for improved decision-making. Below is a white paper which further describes these five essential metrics which are easily implemented using the MKS solution.
Metrics Matter - MKS Prescribes Five Essential IT Metrics for Success
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