Performance Indicators for Production Engineering:Foundations
Input Metrics and PIs - What's the point?
Some context on our SaaS Platforms North Star and our PIs is available in SaaS Platforms North Star Workshop (&1097 - closed). A bit of a longer why is in the expandable below.
Pls read: Expandable to keep this issue size manageable
Input metrics, or PIs can help us to navigate the direction of our team and our work by giving us an indication of whether what we are doing is effective. Metrics used in this way should help us to measure and benchmark whether the things that we have worked on have had a positive effect on the larger organisation and driven the kind of impact that we thought they would when initially proposed.
A good way to think about PIs is that a PI measures the outcome that we are actively trying to drive. That's how we can measure success of what we do as objectively as possible. It's also how we can make adjustments and reflect on why what we're doing is effective, or not?
For clarity, the metrics should not exist as a target, but as a tool to drive reflection and investigation. For example, if we released a cool fix or tool, but haven't seen the uptake and change in behaviour we wanted, is that because the marketing was insufficient, is the documentation not clear or are there rough edges or maybe because the org doesn't have capacity to adopt right now.
Input metrics and PIs should be helpful as a tool to guide our roadmaps, quarterly planning (OKRs) and adjustments to our processes. If a PI is not doing that, then we should remove it.
Context
The purpose of this issue is to propose and discuss Performance Indicators (PIs) for teamFoundations. Most notably when working on OKRs, we struggle to come up with measurable objectives for the team - either because we are not sure what is important to measure, or we don't have a mechanism in place to do the measurement. By aligning PIs with OKRs, roadmap and team direction, we can ensure the output of the team is positively impacting the areas we think are important.
There are currently No PIs listed for the team on the SaaS Platforms Performance Indicators page: