The ROI of Delivery Team Data

Is your company investing in building a data analytics capability and culture to drive revenues, at the expense of insights for employees? Greater focus on team data and insights offers a window into revenue and customer success, particularly for product led companies and those digitally transforming.  It’s not only good for your teams, it’s good for business.

Companies have long been prioritising their investment into generating customer data and insights for the purposes of maximising revenue.  In most cases, this has been to the detriment or underinvestment in a capability focussed on generating and leveraging their team’s data.  This blinkered approach has effectively meant companies are operating with a patch over one eye and aren’t getting the benefits of seeing a fuller picture into the drivers of customer success.  This is especially true for companies where sales and marketing functions have clear metrics that connect their work to customers, but often not software delivery teams who are accountable for building and shipping products to the customer.  

It’s time to join the dots and invest in building a culture and capability in team data and insights. There is immense and growing pressure within current market conditions for agile delivery teams to ship new products.  Yet, we continue to tie one hand behind our teams’ backs by not empowering them with the data and insights to be self determinative in levelling up their practices, boosting their performance and connecting their accountability to customer outcomes. 

Acknowledging the value of team data

Thankfully, a benefit of the pandemic is the greater interest companies are taking to switch focus from customer data to employee data and genuinely care about the results.  This shift embraces employee data serving not as a cost reduction tool through AI and automation, but as a window into team well-being and with a broader duty of care. 

I argue though that this shift in focus needs to go one step further by providing insight into team practices and their connection to customer outcomes.  Specifically, employee data needs to be a marker of a team’s customer focus. This includes the quality and frequency with which they are interacting with and delivering value to their customers.  It’s only with this lens that we see the commercial benefits that team data can unlock. 

Value for teams (and in turn customers)

Self managed agile delivery teams using Umano embed continuous improvement into their way of working.  They deliver, measure and improve.  Over and over again. Improvements to practices not only reduce inefficiencies, but also deliver better outcomes for customers.

Examples from individual teams generating quantifiable benefits from insights learnt through Umano include:

• 25% increase in software releases to customers by adopting a better suited sprint cycle
• 40% reduction in review time by reducing the size of an engineer’s pull request size by 20%, improving overall quality control 
• 15%+ improvement in stabilising the scope of a sprint, ensuring teams deliver more consistently
• 25%+ improvement in sprint completion rates, boosting how predictably teams can ship product to customers 

These are not marginal gains, but wholesale improvements to the effectiveness of a software delivery team. Teams also report greater engagement with their work, more confident and felt more in control of their outcomes – customer satisfaction.

In short, teams are placing value into the hands of customers faster, more consistently and with greater predictability.  Priceless practices when operating in revenue challenged times.

 Value for companies

When Umano aggregated a ‘team of teams’ view for a company’s product delivery function, we quantified an average improvement in efficiency and effectiveness by 20%.  For an average team of 8 costing $1m per annum, this quantified a benefit of $200k per team.

Team data is one of your greatest assets, and is a win-win for cost & revenue drivers

Building a data-driven culture that includes team data is an investment in in both empowering teams to identify and capture their own efficiency gains, but also in empowering them to become more accountable for their outcomes as they connect to their customer.

What’s your data teaching you?

We at Umano believe that data is best used by teams for teams, and not on teams.  When investing in building a culture and capability to leverage your employee data asset, agile delivery teams are best empowered with access to real time insights so they can own their own practices, performance and outcomes.  Decisions to focus on areas of improvement should first come from within the team, rather than ‘on-high’.  In this way, teams can analyse their workflow and improve their effectiveness.  Through visualised trends and patterns, they can respond faster.  Their most important decisions will begin with their unique data generated from their own practices and customer interactions.

It’s time to remove the eye patch and take in the full power and possibility of team data as a driver to greater customer success.

Umano is on a mission to help self-managed agile delivery teams perform at their best by providing analytics and automated assistance.

Sign up here to access your complimentary Umano account and see how your team’s agile sprint practices are tracking.

Photo by Pascal Meier on Unsplash