Evidence-Based Management Metrics

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Evidence-Based Management is an empirical approach that measures value delivered as evidence of organizational agility.

It gives organizations the ability to measure the value they deliver to customers and the means by which they deliver that value, and to use those measures to guide improvements in both.

Leading Indicators

• Employee Satisfaction
  Some form of sentiment analysis to help gauge employee engagement, energy, and enthusiasm.

• Customer Satisfaction
  Some form of sentiment analysis to help gauge customer engagement and happiness with the product.

• Usage Index
  Measurement of usage, by feature, to help infer the degree to which customers find the product useful and whether actual usage meets expectations on how long users should be taking with a feature.

Lagging Indicators

• Revenue per Employee
  The ratio (gross revenue / # of employees) is a key competitive indicator within an industry. This varies significantly by industry.

• Product Cost Ratio
  Total expenses and costs for the product(s)/system(s) being measured, including operational costs compared to revenue.

Leading Indicators

• Competitor strength/weakness

• Customer acquisition or defection

Lagging Indicators

• Market share trends
  Trends in relative percentage of the market controlled by the product

• Customer or user satisfaction gap
  The difference between a customer or user’s desired experience and their current experience.

• Overall market growth/decline relative to market share trends

Leading Indicators

• Technical Debt
  A concept in programming that reflects the extra development and testing work that arises when “quick and dirty” solutions result in later remediation.

• Architectural Coupling

• Defect trends
  Measurement of change in defects since last measurement. A defect is anything that reduces the value of the product to a customer, user, or to the organization itself. Defects are generally things that don’t work as intended.

• Production incident trends
  The number of times the Development Team was interrupted to fix a problem in an installed product. The number and frequency of Production Incidents can help indicate the stability of the product.

• Downtime trends

• Number of active branches, time spent merging

• Time spent context switching
  Number of meetings per day per person, and the number of times a day team members are interrupted to help people outside the team can give simple insight into the magnitude of the problem.

• Velocity trends

Lagging Indicators

• Innovation Rate
  The percentage of effort or cost spent on new product capabilities, divided by total product effort or cost. This provides insight into the capacity of the organization to deliver new product capabilities

• On-product Index
  The percentage of the total user base that is using the current version of the product

• Installed Version Index
  The number of versions of a product that are currently being supported. This reflects the effort the organization spends supporting and maintaining older versions of software

• Usage Index
  Measurement of features in the product that are frequently used. This helps capture features that are rarely or never used.

Leading Indicators

• Frequency of Build Success

• Build pass/fail trends

• Release Stabilization Period
  The time spent correcting product problems between the point the developers say it is ready to release and the point where it is actually released to customers. This helps represent the impact of poor development practices and underlying design and code base.

• MTTR – mean time to Repair
  The average amount of time it takes from when an error is detected and when it is fixed. This helps reveal the efficiency of an organization to fix an error.

Lagging Indicators

• Cycle Time
  The amount of time from when work starts on a release until the point where it is actually released. This measure helps reflect an organization’s ability to reach its customer

• Release Frequency
  The number of releases per time period, e.g. continuously, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. This helps reflect the time needed to satisfy the customer with new and competitive products.

• Lead Time
  The amount of time from when an idea is proposed or a hypothesis is formed until a customer can benefit from that idea. This measure may vary based on customer and product. It is a contributing factor for customer satisfaction

• Time to Learn