Agility Index
Anthony McLin, 10 May 2022
Due to the rapid pace of market change and customer demand, Agility is the single most important indicator of performance in a modern organization. As large organizations adopt digital transform strategies, and as small technology companies grow, it becomes imperitive to find some way to measure the agility of teams in a consistent objective way.
Delivering Agility requires looking at our Key Performance Indicators with new eyes. What matters is not the total efficiency we can deliver, instead what matters is how quickly we can pivot to new directions. Our job as technologists has changed. We are now expected to deliver a culture of enablement and agility across the organization, not simply to build and install tools that make others more efficient.
Formula
The maturity scores we’ve introduced in all the other KPIs in this project have been designed so they can be aggregated into one collective score. The KPIs are also designed to reinforce each other, so that improvement in one area will manifest in improvements against other metrics as well.
- Time From Idea to Production
- Number of Assignees Over Lifespan of Ticket
- Westrum Cultural Survey Index
- Rampup or Onboarding Index
- Time to Provision New Environment
- Agility Index
- Release Size
- Code Refactoring
- Hit By A Bus Factor
- Collective Code Ownership
- Coding Standards
Maturity
Maturity should not be a static goal. Instead, it should be a process of continual improvement. As your organization achieves better maturity scores overall, considering adjusting the constants in various areas to raise the bar.
As this project continues, more KPIs will be added and incorporated into the agility score. Hopefully this proves a valuable resources to positively improve your organization’s culture through DevOps.
Improving
- Remember that this score is merely an abstraction of many different components. Always follow up with deeper investigation and analysis of the underlying data before taking specific actions.
- Do not use this as a evaluative comparision tool between teams that have close scores. Use it to look for outlyers that may need attention or may have discoveries to share.
- Encourage open communication, open houses, and knowledge sharing forums across the organization.
- Make everything that teams do public.
- Make teams self-sufficient.
- Build positive responses strategies for correcting and enhancing culture. Negative feedback is more impactful (in a bad way) than equal amounts of positive feedback.