Productivity Assessment
People are the most indispensable assets in an IT organization, and there is increasing focus on understanding the ROI on human capital, understanding cause and effect. Performance Measurement is the process of measuring efficiency, effectiveness and capability, of an action or a process or a system, against given norm or target. Effectiveness is a measure of doing the right job, efficiency is a measure of doing the job right, while Capability is a measure of ability required to do both, the job right and right job, in the short and long term. An IT organization must understand the needs of the business and the users, and strengthen internal processes in order to meet these needs. While doing so, it must do so within financial parameters, thus needing to continuously learn, improve, innovate and reinvent itself.
This assessment seeks to address a range of IT organizational challenges, across the enterprise or for specific insourced or outsourced delivery centres:
- Strategic Alignment – including expectations set on desired leadership behaviours, role-specific objectives
- Process – role objectives break down, calendar of performance management cycle, line of sight between contribution, organizational goals, rewards and objectivity of the system.
- People – career counsellor, provide counsel on accomplishing goals, facilitate development, employee feedback and structured performance improvement plans.
- Technology and Management Information – integration of process activities reducing administrative tasks, management information systems and performance review information to identify training needs, development plans, succession planning and career management
- Current practices and performance measurement frameworks
- Potential for progress and probability of achieving long-term objectives as also near-term milestones
- Alignment to enable elimination of root barriers, prioritizing improvement needs, driving behaviour and actions required to achieve business objectives
- Productivity at Project Team level-Measurements such as effort, defect, schedule, size, as also, estimation techniques
- Productivity at Project Manager level-Measurements such as cost of quality, effort, defect distribution, quality, productivity
- Productivity at IT Leadership level – Measurements such as estimation Accuracy, quality, productivity, development cost, ROI
Key take aways, depending on the scope set out for the assessment:
- Independent findings on strengths and weaknesses of the current people, performance and productivity management processes, identified performance gaps and improvement opportunities.
- A sound basis for developing a strategic improvement plan to improve the people, performance and productivity management processes in your IT organization
- A sound basis for developing a strategic improvement plan to improve:
- Project team practices in terms of project size, reducing defects and better estimates at task level
- Project management practices in terms of consistency, predictability, better estimation and better project controls
- IT Leadership practices in terms of benchmarking, setting improvement goals and performance targets across groups
