Before you start restructuring, remember to ask yourself the 5 W (and one H) questions (who, why, what, where, when, how)…And what better way to answer those questions than to measure!
Thomas Davenport said it, « A new breed of company have dominated their fields by deploying industrial-strength analytics across a wide variety of activities. In essence, they are transforming their organizations into armies of killer apps and crunching their way to victory ».
Software development is one of those activities. The good news is that you already have all you need to do it:
1. Follow the Application Life-Cycle Management (ALM) best practices to identify patterns, baselines and targets, to plan and to forecast;
2. Use the power of the Team Foundation Server (TFS) platform to support the measures and to report and consolidate data;
3. Leverage the integration of the platform with SharePoint to produce and disseminate the maps, scorecards and dashboards;
4. Finally, analyse the data and readjust accordingly.
Based on the process template you are using TFS, will automatically generate the software development metrics, the reports and the dashboards making the measurement process much easier.
This is the perfect way to improve your software development practices, but more importantly, it’s the perfect way to answer some of the difficult questions we are being asked in this turmoil economy, as well as to make the right decisions related to cost or performance.
In conclusion, leverage your platform to improve your business and remember those few quotations:
“It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly “
“Do not mistake activity for achievement”
“You get what you measure”
