DORA and SCORE are two the most powerful frameworks which allows to identify base metrics that measure your DevOps (not only) team performance.
The first step to measuring team performance is to define clear and SMART goals for your team. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. These criteria help you to set realistic and meaningful objectives that can be tracked and assessed.
Once you have defined your SMART goals, you need to use key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure how well your team is achieving them. KPIs are quantifiable metrics that reflect the critical success factors of your team’s work.
Having KPIs in place and well defined, it is time to create an approach which helps improve your team (DevOps, SRE, etc.) efficiency and communicate performance to business stakeholders, which can accelerate business results.
DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)
DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), a pioneer in helping organizations achieve high DevOps and organizational performance with data-driven insights. DORA framework identifies four key metrics that indicate the performance of a software development team:
- Deployment Frequency. How often an organization successfully releases to production.
- Lead Time for Changes. The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production.
- Change Failure Rate. The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production.
- Time to Restore Service. How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production.
Deployment frequency
Deployment frequency is the frequency of successful deployments to production over the given date range (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly).
Software leaders can use the deployment frequency metric to understand how often the team successfully deploys software to production, and how quickly the teams can respond to customers’ requests or new market opportunities. High deployment frequency means you can get feedback sooner and iterate faster to deliver improvements and features.
How to improve deployment frequency
The first step is to benchmark the cadence of code releases between groups and projects. Next, you should consider:
- Adding automated testing.
- Adding automated code validation.
- Breaking the changes down into smaller iterations.
Lead time for changes
Lead time for changes is the amount of time it takes a code change to get into production.
Lead time for changes is not the same as Lead time. In the value stream, lead time measures the time it takes for work on an issue to move from the moment it’s requested (Issue created) to the moment it’s fulfilled and delivered (Issue closed).
For software leaders, lead time for changes reflects the efficiency of CI/CD pipelines and visualizes how quickly work is delivered to customers. Over time, the lead time for changes should decrease, while your team’s performance should increase. Low lead time for changes means more efficient CI/CD pipelines.
How to improve lead time for changes
The first step is to benchmark the CI/CD pipelines’ efficiency between groups and projects. Next, you should consider:
- Using Value Stream Analytics to identify bottlenecks in the processes.
- Breaking the changes down into smaller iterations.
- Adding automation.
Time to restore service
Time to restore service is the amount of time it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production.
For software leaders, time to restore service reflects how long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production. Low time to restore service means the organization can take risks with new innovative features to drive competitive advantages and increase business results.
How to improve time to restore service
The first step is to benchmark the team response and recover from service interruptions and outages, between groups and projects. Next, you should consider:
- Improving the observability into the production environment.
- Improving response workflows.
Change failure rate
Change failure rate is how often a change cause failure in production.
Software leaders can use the change failure rate metric to gain insights into the quality of the code being shipped. High change failure rate may indicate an inefficient deployment process or insufficient automated testing coverage.
How to improve change failure rate
The first step is to benchmark the quality and stability, between groups and projects. Next, you should consider:
- Finding the right balance between stability and throughput (Deployment frequency and Lead time for changes), and not sacrificing quality for speed.
- Improving the efficacy of code review processes.
- Adding automated testing.
S.C.O.R.E. framework
“A high-performing team demonstrates a high level of synergism—the simultaneous actions of separate entities that together have a greater effect than the sum of their individual efforts. It is possible, for example, for a team’s efforts to exemplify an equation such as 2 + 2 = 5! High-performing teams require a complementary set of characteristics known collectively as “SCORE™”—cohesive strategy, clear roles and responsibilities, open communication, rapid response, and effective leadership.”
Sattar Bawany (2023)
SCORE framework, it offers five mechanisms that facilitate the translation of purpose intent into purpose action.
Simplify
Make your purpose simple and convincing, with shared frames of reference. Complicated strategies fail. Leaders need to work carefully to simplify the complexity involved in enacting business activity. Purpose is no different. It needs to be simple enough to be understood by the entire organizational workforce, the wider supply chain and other connected stakeholders. A statement of purpose should be precise, not vague or woolly. It should establish what and whose problems the organization seeks to solve and it should be convincing about why the organization is particularly well-suited to addressing them.
How to Simplify
- Simple statements: it should empower stakeholders to interpret the intent and meaning with accuracy, allowing enough leeway to implement in context specific environments.
- Think broader to develop a narrower focus: it is very easy to drop immediately into mission and strategy if you dive immediately into your own specific activities.
- Draw from your heritage: often going back to the origins of the organization helps simplify purpose. Statements of intent from the founders of organizations can help boards rediscover why the organization exists.
- Purpose should stand the test of time: while strategy can and should be re-evaluated in light of new significant external factors or indeed changes in senior management, purpose should have a longer shelf life.
- Simplicity can often be helped by using informal language, especially where it is commonly used in the workplace environment.
- Orient the choice of language to reflect industry norms: use colorful/informal language where it is commonly used in the workplace environment, or less colorful/formal language where that is the norm.
Connect
Once it has been simply and clearly articulated, corporate purpose must drive what the organization does – its strategy and capital allocation decisions. Strategy is about choices that are made and choices that are consciously rejected after serious deliberation. For purpose to be enacted with authenticity, it has to be the reference point for such decisions. Internally, boards need to make sure that purpose translates into what everyone in the organization does, because unless purpose statements translate into actions they are meaningless. Externally, the board should ensure that the organization’s purpose connects with partner organizations throughout its supply chain and customer markets.
How to connect
- Take responsibility for showing why it matters. Often boards complain that investors are disinterested in purpose. If it matters, it is incumbent on the board to articulate why.
- Use purpose as a way to challenge your assumptions and rethink the status-quo. Active board discussions on how purpose, mission, values and vision are aligned will improve critical thinking on large scale trends that have the potential to impact the organization over the medium to long term.
- Purpose should be broad enough to be applicable generally, but specific enough to be relevant to the organization and its skill sets to be meaningful and therefore connect with employees and other stakeholders.
- Lead and connect by example. It is up to board directors to ensure that their colleagues throughout the organization see what to do differently once purpose has been set.
- Devolve the specifics. While purpose must be consistent, the specific touchpoints will differ throughout the organization. Boards should encourage decentralization and flexibility when it comes to connecting purpose into practice, respecting different operating norms in different areas of the workplace.
- Leadership and communication are inseparable. It is not the tactical responsibility of the press office.
Own
Ownership of purpose starts with the board. It has to put in place appropriate structures, control systems and processes for enacting purpose. This goes well beyond formal committee structures such as risk, compliance and ethics committees. It has to be embraced by everyone in the organization from the board to the shop floor. The purpose also has to be accepted and supported by the organization’s shareholders if it is to have any credibility.
How to own
- Everyone owns purpose. Distribute ownership down the organization. Create forums for colleague engagement rather than relying on command and transmit approaches. A combination of executive meetings, town halls, digital forums and two-way communication channels all should be considered.
- Embed ownership by organizing regular discussions throughout the organization on how purpose connects to delivery of stated vision, and how it is enacted through values and pursuit of mission. Storytelling plays an important part in building shared ownership too.
- Purpose should form the heart of shareholder relationships. They should be the basis on which an organization’s investor relations and communications are built. They should be the way in which shareholders formulate their corporate engagements. Shareholders should be consulted about proposals to change an organization’s purpose and be encouraged to have a ‘say on purpose’.
- Purpose is not the same thing as sustainability. Sustainability should be considered within the organization’s purpose, as all successful business strategies must be sustainable. Purpose speaks to the broader question of why the organization exists, being owned by the board collectively rather than specific sustainability or other internal organizational functions.
- Accept good, not perfect. Leaders should realize that an organization can be faithful to the overall purpose while having some products that are less sustainable than ideal. Own the journey, as well as the outcome.
Reward
The board has to define measures of performance that evaluate the success of the organization in delivering on its purpose. It should build a group-wide performance measurement system that aligns the organization’s incentives and rewards with promotion of purposeful behavior. For the majority of management, financial measures remain the most significant elements of compensation and promotion. It is important that these correctly reflect the success of the company in delivering on its purpose. The financial measures should be combined with material non-financial metrics that record the success of the organization in a balanced way, delivering benefits to all its stakeholders including its shareholders.
How to reward
- Purpose concerns the big question of why an organization exists. Reward colleagues who act or lead in support of this wider purpose, not just when they deliver or execute the direct mission.
- Delivering purpose is not just about setting financial rewards. Non-financial reward mechanisms are critical drivers of colleague satisfaction. Board directors should utilize basket of rewards including flexible working, providing individuals with the opportunity to do interesting work, supporting individual colleague pro-bono choices, and delivering board-level feedback.
- Reward the enactment of purpose through explicit positive endorsement and praise. Call out inspiring stories as they relate to the delivery of purpose at all levels within the organization.
- Listen to, and support where possible, individual choices of colleagues when it comes to wider social initiatives. Organizations can learn from colleagues’ personal choices and sometimes these personal activities help inform the wider organizational purpose.
- Actively call out bad behavior. Misconduct must not be rewarded by career progression up through the organization. Articulate your view around transparency and fairness, allowing scope for challenge.
- Report not just the metrics used, but how boards came to the decision around which metrics matter. Boards should report on how they govern non-financial disclosure
Exemplify
A key role of leadership is to bring organizational purpose to life through communication and narrative strategies. Done well, these build a sense of shared identity around a common purpose that inspires those working in the organization to believe that they are contributing as a team to something that is meaningful and fulfilling. The narratives should be vivid and uplifting but also authentic in conveying honestly and openly the challenges and failures as well as the successes. They should reveal a willingness of the leadership to accept personal sacrifices in bearing their share of the costs of failure as well as the rewards of success.
How to exemplify
- Care should be taken to avoid ‘waterfall’ stories, where purpose gets relegated to the easier storytelling around what an organization does (mission).
- Actively consider how to make stories fun. Business is a serious endeavor, but the stories about business do not need to always be so.
- Embed an emotional component in your purpose. Board directors need to ensure that purpose is not just ‘another process’.
- Communication and storytelling has become much more visual over the last decade. Communicating purpose is particularly suited to the use of visual platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat.
Please visit or #CyberTechTalk WIKI pages for much more information about designing reliable systems, monitoring and information security. The Wiki is the CONSTANTLY GROWING knowledge database which is organized in systematic and easy to find way.
We as a BiLinkSoft, provide and support fully managed and automated solutions to archive your operational excellence in:
– Reliability-as-a-Service
– Monitoring and Observability
– Cloud adoption
– Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
– Incident Management
– Release Management
– Security
Contact Us for FREE evaluation.
Be ethical, save your privacy!