How Metrics Benefit Three Types of Engineering Leaders In An Org
Metrics don’t only help in the decision-making process, or solely benefit the highest seniority levels within a team. They have advantages for all members of the team irrespective of their seniority.
By the end of this blog post, you will understand how VPs of Engineering, CTOs, Engineering Managers, and Team Leads can take advantage of engineering metrics. From communication to workload management to continuous learning.
How VPs of Engineering and CTOs benefit from using metrics:
- Communication: Identifying, prioritizing, tracking and communicating project progress and issues to all levels of the organization.
- Problem discovery: Discovering and correcting technical and managerial problems that can be more difficult or costly to resolve later on.
- Problem anticipation: Using metrics as a resource to anticipate problems. Avoiding being forced into a reactive situation that doesn’t allow for alternative mediation.
- Justification for the best alternative: Using metrics as evidence to justify the best alternatives. Project managers must be able to defend the decisions they take with historical data and then justify changes to plans with current data.
How Engineering Managers benefit from using metrics:
- Workload management: Given their higher level of experience, metrics will allow senior developers to manage current and predicted workloads individually.
- Increase information sharing: Identifying, tracking and communicating issues within their team, and reducing the ambiguity of complex software projects for junior developers.
- Increase knowledge sharing: In teams with mixed seniorities, senior developers can spot issues or problems and help junior developers resolve them by sharing their knowledge; thus reducing the bus factor.
How Team Leads benefit from using metrics:
- Continuous learning: When team leads have a transparent insight into processes and the progress of the team, they will be able to identify areas of improvement and have access to data from which they can learn.
- Guidance: Metrics provide guidance to the whole team and help in the identification of the core strengths and weaknesses.
- Reducing the big brother culture: Agile teams are based around trust and autonomy. By teams using metrics there is no need to constantly supervise the work done by developers individually because progress is being monitored in a more passive way at a team level.
How can Athenian help you?
Athenian understands the value that metrics have for modern software engineering organizations. We have seen the benefits that these provide to all levels of seniority and how they reduce inconsistencies in decision making among them.
To access the true value of metrics, you can use the Athenian Software Delivery dashboard. It will allow you to:
- Overview the performance of the team as a whole: This will reduce the big brother culture and improve the trust and autonomy within your team.
- Assess the agility and leanness of your team: You will have access to KPIs such as lead time, cycle time, team velocity and open/close rates.
- Increase the transparency and communication within your team: Improve the communication by sharing progress constantly and providing feedback.
- Justify decision making: Justify decision making by accessing current and historical data.
- Understand project complexity and uniqueness: Understand each unique project and how to optimize it.
Want to know more about Key Users? And what metrics could help you? Click here!
