The document discusses how to measure IT performance and value to businesses by focusing on revenue, cost reduction, and service improvement. It emphasizes the importance of building trust, using effective metrics, and recognizing both successes and failures in order to drive improvements in IT outcomes. Additionally, it advises against measuring less relevant metrics and promotes the design of actionable measurements to enhance value delivery.

1. Measuring IT Performance
Jane Prusakova
@jprusakova

2. IT value to business
• Increase Revenue
• Decrease Cost
• Improve Service

3. Does IT deliver good value?
• The feeling of “warm and fuzzy”
• Direct attribution of revenue streams
• Metrics and measurements

4. Ways to consider IT department
• IT is a cost center
• It is expensive and always asking
for more
• It overpromises and under-
delivers
• Engineers are weird
• IT enables the business
• Grunt work is automated
• Insight into what works
• Engineers are still weird

5. Perceived success of IT
- On time
- On budget
- Uncontrolled change

6. How to build trust
• Start from trust.
• Build relationships, get to know people.
• Be truthful and direct. Share knowledge and
invite collaboration.
• Be respectful.
• Leave room for mistakes. Offer a second chance.

7. Does IT deliver good value?
• The feeling of “warm and fuzzy”
• Direct attribution of revenue streams
• Metrics and measurements

8. IT revenue
• Selling software and IT services externally
• Charging internal departments
• ???

9. Does IT deliver good value?
• The feeling of “warm and fuzzy”
• Direct attribution of revenue streams
• Metrics and measurements

10. Measuring IT performance
• Is IT working hard?
• What and how much does IT deliver?
• Can we get more?

11. Insist on metrics
get
precisely & only
what is measured

12. Measuring has a cost
• Reports and dashboards take time and attention
• Excessive reporting hurts morale
• Doing well per metric leads to complacency
• Effort spent on gaming the metrics

13. What to measure?
• How hard is IT working?
• How much stuff is IT working on?
• What value does IT deliver?
• How quickly does IT deliver value?

14. What NOT to measure
• Hours spent in the office or online
• Lines of code written
• Number of features designed or implemented
• Number of bugs found, fixed or not fixed
• Level of solution complexity
…

15. Design better metrics
• Lower cost of measuring
• Straightforward and easy to measure
• Move with increase in value received
• Encourage improvement

16. Measure value delivered
• Notice success
• Failure can be easier to
remember
• Record changes over time
• Routine changes slowly
• Failure is immediate

17. Measure Time
• How often IT updates are implemented
• Lead time between an idea and
delivery
• Time to start of implementation
• Time to initial piece or prototype
• Time to complete implementation
• How often IT generates ideas

18. Measure consistency and risk
• Smoothly running infrastructure
• Ability to handle peak demand
• Security against internal and external attacks
• Ease of access
• Predictability of changes and events

19. Improving IT outcomes based on metrics
• Notice what leads to success
• Do more of that
• Focus on increasing delivery frequency and shorter
lead times
• Regularly inspect security, system capacity and ease
of access
• Reward stability

20. Iterate on success
• Record metrics often
• Make it easy
• Inspect results at short intervals
• Look at short-term and long-term trends
• Implement just a few changes at a time
• But do it often
• Update metrics and measurement process based on learning

21. Help IT deliver good value
• Build trust
• Focus on value
• Implement actionable metrics and
measurements to guide improvement

22. Measuring IT Performance
Jane Prusakova
@jprusakova