January 14, 2019 at 9:12 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Measuring Effectiveness
January 15, 2019 at 4:20 am
Your description of yourself does sound suspiciously like me Steve! Or at least my self image of myself 🙂
I'd love a way to measure effectiveness. It's very difficult and I kind of know it in my bones but would struggle to put numbers to it. Any more help you can offer will be very welcome.
January 15, 2019 at 9:30 am
I really enjoyed this article, Steve. Your introduction to it via recognition (Employee of the month, etc.) was excellent. We have an Employee of the month aware. I've never seen any developer or DBA get it. I think its because the work we do is so much behind the scenes, that people don't recognize it, even though if our work weren't done, then nothing that those who get the Employee of the month would have been possible.
The main thrust of your article is on how we can measure DevOps. WOW, great question! I work in state government, where traditional project management is very deeply entrenched. But, even in this environment I'm seeing small, incremental steps towards DevOps. At this point I think the metrics used to determine success are things like the number of help tickets closed or the speed with which they're closed. This article, and the link you pointed to, encourages me to begin to consider other means of measuring the success of DevOps. Without new ways of measuring the efficacy of DevOps ultimately I think it is doomed to failure, because DevOps doesn't have a direct impact upon how many help desk tickets are closed or the speed with which they're closed. I guess there are two challenges for me. First, working with my colleagues to come up with better metrics to measure DevOps efficacy, and second to convince upper management of the validity of those metrics.
Rod
January 15, 2019 at 10:27 am
Definitely both of those are challenges. What new metrics show that we're getting things done. I think it becomes helpful to start to look at where you focus effort. Like making a change to reduces tickets. It's a hidden metric, but if you identify tickets that occur at some rate (say once a week) and you can remove those by changing something, then you can start to measure "tickets retired and no longer occur". If there are work hour metrics on those tickets, you can show benefits.
All of this takes some thinking time, which I feel many of us lack. We're so busy trying to get something done, we don't stop and think about how else we might handle something.
January 15, 2019 at 12:09 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 10:27 AMDefinitely both of those are challenges. What new metrics show that we're getting things done. I think it becomes helpful to start to look at where you focus effort. Like making a change to reduces tickets. It's a hidden metric, but if you identify tickets that occur at some rate (say once a week) and you can remove those by changing something, then you can start to measure "tickets retired and no longer occur". If there are work hour metrics on those tickets, you can show benefits.All of this takes some thinking time, which I feel many of us lack. We're so busy trying to get something done, we don't stop and think about how else we might handle something.
Very good points. I know I'm often too busy getting something done that I don't put a lot of time thinking how it might be done better.
Rod
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