Our Agile Scorecard process evaluates your current Software Development Life Cycle by talking to you, your team members, and your customers to find out if your current version of "Agile" or other software development methodology is working for your business model, suggesting where it could be improved, and making recommendations as to what other methodologies might work better.

Even if you are the best team leader that has ever existed, your human imperfections in the following areas could be causing your team to lose forward momentum. In Software Development, the key expense for any version of success - whether it is profitability from paying customers or providing useful software to other business units - is always Developer Time. The following are far and away the most common ways companies balloon Developer Time without any benefit:

Wasteful, Interruptive Processes

Developers are not code manufacturers; they are problem solvers, and that ability works best under long periods of uninterrupted, undistracted focus. Every hour that your developers are spending in meetings is an hour that they are not producing software. Every email or Slack message that pulls them out of immersion costs them on average 15 minutes to get their head back into “the zone” on what they were thinking about. How many of those can you afford to have in your Developers’ day? How many could you eliminate?

Developer Morale

Frustration, Irritation, Annoyance, Anxiety, or Stress - these emotions are adrenal emotions. They cause adrenaline to be released into the bloodstream via the Fight-or-Flight reflex. Adrenaline Kills Creativity. The difference between a frustrated developer and a calm, happy developer is that the frustrated developer (if they have a good work ethic) will sit and force themselves to do the 10 hours of work to get the task done. But the calm, focused developer is much more likely to discover an innovative approach that saves that work from needing to be done in the first place. This is because the creative portion of the frustrated developer’s brain is otherwise engaged in imaginary arguments with their coworkers or boss. If your metric is meaningful software, an emotionally supported Developer can produce 10x more than a frustrated one.

Rework

Even if your team is perfectly streamlined and your employees are all happy clams working at top productivity levels, you can still waste Developer Time on producing software that ends up getting thrown away. Somewhere in the vicinity of 90% of your Developer Time is spent writing code that will never make it to production, usually due to bad communication pipelines. Think that is an exaggeration? Think of your last project that made it to production. Now, check with your developers and ask them how long they think it would take them to perfectly replicate the functionality of the software, assuming they lost all the code and were starting from scratch but knowing what they know now. My guess it the answer is about 10% of what the actual project took.

Taking these three factors at the levels of the “average” software development team, you can easily estimate a 60% efficiency factor for Wasteful Processes, 50% efficiency in the Employee Morale, and 20% efficiency from Rework. That results in a total average of 6% of what would be theoretically possible in a perfect environment. Now, no one can achieve perfect results, but could you improve on 6%? Where would you estimate your efficiency numbers are?

Here’s how we can help

• We bring a career’s worth of experience, not only in teams that ran like a top, but those who made critical errors and learned the consequences. We have seen what works, what doesn’t, and most importantly, why it doesn’t.
• We provide an outside 3rd party perspective that does not have your corporate or industry blind spots. A lateral thought process can often be just what you need to jog the innovation within your own team.
• If need be, we can be frank and tell you the hard truths that employees who could lose their jobs might be more reticent to voice.

Getting this report will not solve all your problems. But it will give you a place to start and point you in the right direction. And if you like what you see, we partner with you to move your team forward with a plan that will bring about the changes you need in a smooth, comfortable transition.

What's Included: