Every leader in a technology organisation is keen to show impact and value. This typically means making changes that improve the performance of your technology teams. But, of course, to drive your performance improvement you need to know what’s working and what isn’t. That’s where technology delivery performance benchmarking comes in. Since we launched in 2019, we’ve seen hundreds of teams and organizations around the world use data, metrics, and benchmarks to better understand their technology delivery performance and improve ROI.
In general terms, benchmarking helps you get objective data on what performance looks like in your organisation. It helps you identify where your org is underperforming, what is impacting performance, and how it feeds into ROI. It establishes a set of metrics that show you what ‘good’ looks like and allows you to compare yourself against that. Typically you measure yourself against best practice, i.e. high performing teams. Or, you may compare against peers in your sector. Whatever the case, the key is that the metrics seek to establish whether you are performing well or not.
What you are looking at when you are benchmarking is really how well all of the elements that make up your technology delivery create value for customers or stakeholders. That is, you are looking at how effectively you find value for customers in your product development, innovation or design; whether you are getting quality experiences to customers and stakeholders; and whether you are doing this quickly enough. We call this the Technology Productivity Triad: Value Focus, Speed, Quality.
Your entire end-to-end tech organisation helps to deliver this value. So a good benchmark process looks at that end-to-end delivery. You’ll need to benchmark your infrastructure, tooling, security. Poor performance here impacts quality to customers and costs in support.
You need to look at your software development lifecycle and how well it works. You might, for example, have different project, products or codebases and these will impact performance. If it’s an old codebase, for example, you may find that most of your investment is actually spent on defects. Alternatively, you may be on a cutting-edge codebase but your processes are slow or unstable. Whatever the case, speed and velocity are going to be negatively impacted. Things will take more time. And time is money.
Finally, there is the value focus. If we acknowledge that the fundamental point of all technology delivery is to create value for customers, to be successful you need to know that the work you are actually working on right things. That is, the work your doing is creating value –and enough value– to warrant the investment. This is where product management, design and strategy impact success. How effectively do you discover value? And what it is the quality of features you are releasing? Are customers and stakeholders happy? And, are you seeing the expected ROI? You can be on the best stack, with the best software processes, but if you are focusing on the wrong things you are not going to see ROI.
In any benchmark process you are looking for metrics to compare yourself against. This is where competitive benchmarking is useful. It allows you to compare yourself to best practice, sector, or peers. Traditionally, you would go to an analyst firm to get insight on such benchmarks.
However, the rise of data-driven engineering and DORA metric has changed this. Engineering metrics tools like our own Implement.io and others allow leaders to get much greater visibility on data, metrics and benchmarks to drive performance. The data is less qualitative and at a much more granular level. They also provide trend analysis to show performance over time.
Most importantly, these data, metrics and benchmarks are focused on the key elements of the Technology Productivity Triad. They look at your data around quality and speed. And, for the first time, they also give real insight on focus and investment. For many org this latter insight in game-changing. It allows leaders to ensure that all of their performance efforts are fundamentally directed at actually delivering value to customers or stakeholders.
Technology Delivery Performance Benchmarking is a hugely valuable exercise to help leaders understand the performance of their teams. It allows you to compare your performance against others to identify potential issues in your technology delivery and address them. The rise of data-driven engineering means leaders now have much more granular data, metrics and benchmarks to be able to make more impact and value than every before.
We specialise in helping technology leaders use data and metrics to improve technology delivery performance and achieve better outcomes.
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