3. Metrics to track and improve delivery focus (strategic alignment)
Focus (or strategic alignment) analytics demonstrate that finite software delivery resources are focused efficiently on your strategic (roadmap) priorities. This is the first key challenge in optimising software delivery ROI (value maximisation).
As the figure below illustrates, a significant proportion of available technology resources are typically not focused on building new features and generating value.
Instead, they get diverted to unplanned work, such as resolving incidents, or to less productive areas of planned work, such as technical debt.
An analytics platform like Plandek enables delivery teams to easily track and report to stakeholders on this resource ‘focus’ question to show clearly:
- Total resource allocation and output by roadmap item or strategic priority (value stream)
- Total resource allocation and output by planned and unplanned work categories
- The composition of any unplanned work – e.g., bugs and critical incidents
- The composition of the planned work – e.g., new features versus technical debt.
Viewers can, therefore, identify the overall proportion of resources and output accounted for by value-creating planned new feature delivery across strategic priorities with ease. Plandek enables teams to express this focus by comparing completed works (tickets or story points) against headcount or costs.
Example reports are illustrated in the images below.
