August 29, 2023
As a technology delivery performance consultancy, our mission is to help technology leaders in industry maximize the performance of their teams and achieve better business outcomes. We believe better data and metrics play a critical role in helping leaders achieve these goals.
In our work with clients we use our Implement.io platform to analyze hundreds of data-points from engineering, release, and project management tools to understand each organization’s unique performance model to help drive tailored optimization. While we do use hundreds of data-points, we group these into the ‘Technology Productivity Triad’ of Value Focus, Quality and Speed. In this article we want to share how the Technology Productivity Triad offers a useful framework to look at productivity.
At the heart of everything we do is the belief in the power of teams. From our own experience of delivering technology for startups, scale-ups, and enterprise organizations, we’ve seen that delivery success is not about the performance of individuals per se, but how individuals work together as a team.
To be clear, we’ve had our fair share of weak or unproductive employees. So we know the individual contribution does matter. But in technology, it’s teams that deliver. Not individuals. Therefore, in our view, the evaluation of technology delivery performance and productivity should be done in the context of the team and whether the team, in aggregate, is as productive as it can be.
But what is productivity in technology delivery? Loosely, productivity refers to the efficiency and effectiveness with which technology products or solutions are developed, tested, and delivered to end-users or clients. It includes planning, design, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance. There’s a lot to it.
But let’s step back for a moment and ask what all the planning, design, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance is fundamentally about. In reality, all the planning, design, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance is really about delivering value to customers. Indeed, as businesses, if we are not delivering value to customers, we won’t be in business for long.
Productivity then, is about how well we are working to deliver value to customers. And that comes down to three things:
Productivity then is about Value Focus, Quality and Speed — what we call the ‘Technology Productivity Triad.’ All of the work we do with clients is through framework. All of the data, metrics and benchmarking we leverage look at these key dimensions to get a better view of technology productivity.
Whatever technology you are delivering should be solving some problem for your customers, staff or stakeholders. Your solution should be trying to help them make more money, save money, mitigate some risk, or improve their experience. Only by focusing on solutions and features that do one or more of these things, can you be sure that your technology team is working on ‘the right thing.’
In tech functions in industry there is a tendency to focus and report on output as a measure of productivity and success. Output is a signal of productivity but, as we have seen, it isn’t productivity. Most tech leaders in industry know that output isn’t really an accurate gauge of productivity but still the bad habit persists. The reason for this is that the value focus and outcomes are not always in the control of technology leaders. The value focus is often inherited from product strategy – or lack of it. So, technology teams do not always have a clear grip on value.
However, even within technology teams, there is often a lack of data on actual investment in value. In our work with clients, we look each feature, epic, or project to see what the real investment is.
With the right data, as in the graphic above, you can see how much of a team’s time and effort is about customer value outcomes, and how much is about quality issues, poor processes or somethings else. Only by understanding where your actual focus is, can you really transform productivity.
“Quality isn’t just costed in technical debt tickets. It’s worse than that. It’s debt interest you are paying on every ticket and initiative.
While focusing on the right thing is critical, quality is equally so. Delivering subpar solutions to customers will lead to dissatisfaction, lost revenue, and damage to brand reputation. What’s more, it inevitably leads to more investment in remedial work and redesign. Poor quality makes more work in technical debt tickets. If you are measuring and reporting outputs you can celebrate that you are getting through more tickets. But if you are being strategic and thinking about outcomes, you will see immediately how poor quality is going to make getting any value to customers harder.
In our work with clients, when we look at the actual data around technology delivery quality, we see just how much of a team’s time and efforts on each ticket and project is wasted as a the result of quality issues. Quality isn’t just costed in technical debt. It’s worse than that. It’s debt interest you are paying on every ticket and initiative.
To be truly productive means achieving the best quality possible. Organizations must value and prioritize behaviors and practices that improve quality: testing, code reviews, and continuous integration. And product and design have their role too. Improvement in customer research and design validation can have an oversized on quality and improve value to customers.
Poor quality is costly. Customers are impacted. And marketing, sales, support and ops all lose out to poor quality. Only by understanding the quality of what you are actually really doing can you transform productivity. Having accurate visibility of investment cost of quality is transformational for leadership.
Obviously, in today’s highly competitive environment, speed is of the essence. The ability to execute and deliver products and features to customers at speed can make the difference between success and failure. It is how you increase revenue, reduce costs, and improve margin.
In engineering teams speed is measured with velocity and ticket throughput metrics. But again, there are good and bad ways to improve velocity and throughput. You can increase velocity by throwing more bodies at an initiative. You can also be faster but deliver poorer quality. And, sadly, we’re often very fast at delivering the wrong thing. In all cases, we’re faster but not more productive.
Clearly, it’s important to be strategic about engineering velocity and ticket throughout. Embracing methodologies, such as Agile and DevOps, can significantly accelerate technology delivery. And these approaches promote iterative development, collaboration, and automation.
But what we see as interesting from the data is that it’s often the small gains here that can be truly impactful in velocity and accelerating time to market. Time and again we that small changes that streamline processes, minimize bottlenecks, and eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy can have outsize impact.
As we said, we look at hundreds of data-points when benchmarking teams and organizations, but all of these data-points are related in some way or another to the Technology Productivity Triad of value focus, quality, and speed. To be productive, you need to know what you are really working on, how well you are working on it, and at what speed.
By focusing on customer value, quality and speed you are focussing on real productivity improvements. Focusing on customer value puts the customer at center of the business. The quality of the work you are doing is improved. And the speed is increased. In effect, improving productivity means more of your efforts and technology investment is going into delivering customer value.
In our work we always try to look at the performance and productivity problems of teams and organizations via the Technology Productivity Triad: Value Focus, Quality, and Speed. The three lenses within the framework fundamentally help us understand each organization’s unique performance model as well as its challenges. Adopting the Technology Productivity Triad framework in your technology org may help to align you teams around what matters. It can help foster a culture of customer-centric innovation, agility, and excellence — propelling your business into the future.
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