I was very privileged to speak at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015 yesterday with fellow Seattleite Troy Magennis. We gave a 25 minute talk on using metrics to help teams see how to improve. Instead of telling people what they should measure, we focused on teaching people how to make some decisions on their own.

We covered:

  • Understanding different types of business analytics and when you would use them
  • Identifying vanity metrics and how to go beyond them
  • The dangers of measuring individual performance over team outcomes
  • Creating a balanced set of metrics that monitor organizational health
  • The importance of trends over individual data points
  • Using beautiful presentations coupled with interactivity to engage people to investigate further

The talk was recorded and I’ll post that as soon as its online, but I wanted to put the slides out there for consumption in case anyone wanted them.

One thing we do want to know from the world at large is “What balance of metrics do you use and why?” I would love it if you would answer in my comments section whether or not you are attending the conference!