Tie performance to business goals
Following up on the performance pitch post, here are some tips for helping get your technology team talking in the language of your business team:
- Take the time to define both top-line and bottom-line application business metrics
- Work to prioritize that list of metrics to better understand what’s most important (creating tiers can help)
- Identify what processes and transactions will affect those key metrics
When the team finds a possible performance issue later on, they can then translate what might otherwise be a generic metric (we're X seconds slower on transaction Y) into something that has meaning to the business (given that we're X seconds slower on transaction Y, we expect abandonment to go up Z%).
Defining those metrics, prioritizing them, and tying those to transactions doesn't necessarily need to be complicated. For some applications it will be. But for most applications I've tested, I suspect we could have done this over a couple one-hour workshops using Excel. Don't make it harder than it needs to be.
January 3rd, 2010 - 14:25
A similar approach might be to figure out what the actual value of getting a % improvement in different performance metrics. For example, if you can estimate the cost of delay as well as the value for improving performance, you can give the team a project model to determine when it makes sense to spend time improving the performance and when it makes sense to work on other things or stop altogether. You’re basically giving the development team more context so they can make an informed decision. My thinking on this was influenced by Reinertsen’s Managing the Design Factory, specifically Chapter 2:
Project Models
Done from the perspective of the development team
Quantify what overruns of expense, cost, and performance, and for a one-month change in schedule will do to profitability
Better to have simple model that everyone understands and agrees with than to have opaque model — inputs are everything
Predict what a one-month change of schedule by analyzing market and potential competition to project delay scenarios
Benefits of using project model: make better decisions using data, faster decision making, higher buy-in on team decisions
Hope this is along the lines of what you were thinking!