A critical focus area for any leader is ensuring your team is both productive and delivering high-quality work. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) provide measurable insights into these areas, helping you optimize performance.
Below are some essential KPIs that every middle manager should monitor:
Productivity KPIs
- Value Velocity: Use a value scoring technique to attribute value to work items. This works best at the Feature or Epic level. Measure how much value a team delivers (meaning fully deployed) during a time period (typically quarterly). Track how it trends over time.
- Cycle Time: The time it takes to complete a work item from start to finish. Shorter cycle times often indicate higher efficiency.
- Work-in-Progress (WIP): Number of tasks being worked on simultaneously. Lower WIP often leads to higher focus and increased productivity, especially as reflected in Value Velocity.
Quality KPIs
- Defect Rate: The number of defects found after a work item is promoted beyond the dev environment, typically to integration and production staging environments. A lower defect rate indicates better quality. This can help identify opportunities to shift quality left within your delivery process to accelerate defect discovery and avoid the higher cost associated with later defect discovery and resolution efforts.
- Customer Satisfaction: Send out surveys or collect feedback that gauges how satisfied customers are with the team’s delivery.
- Code Review Metrics (for software teams): Measures such as the number of changes requested during code reviews, showing how well the team is adhering to standards.
- Escaped Defects: Track the number of defects that make it into production. Minimizing these helps ensure quality is maintained in live environments. Conducting a pareto analysis of defect root causes can provide valuable insight into improvement focus areas.
Balanced Approach
- Productivity vs. Quality Balance: It’s essential to balance KPIs between productivity and quality. High throughput without attention to defect rates may result in poor outcomes in the long term.
Regularly reviewing these KPIs will help middle managers maintain high-performing teams while delivering quality work.
Check out Path to Agility® Navigator to assess your teams’ ability to deliver value to customers. Navigator enables you to quickly build a tailored improvement roadmap based on current state and desired results, enabling you to effectively identify and prioritize capabilities such as Quality Feedback Loop Shortened and Cycle Time Reduced.
Request a demo to get a first-hand look at how Path to Agility Navigator can help you improve quality and productivity.
