Measuring organizational progress

We believe the best way to measure progress in a distributed technology operating model is via flow metrics. If you baseline your percentage of complete and accurate lead, wait, and process times, you will not only be able to optimize individual processes but also see whether completely revamped processes would actually help improve the overall outcome. For example, if your compliance process still imposes a wait time of 4 to 6 weeks to get your compute instance provisioned, does it matter that the actual provisioning of an EC2 instance only takes 5 minutes versus the previous 1 hour on your local virtual machine farm?

A word of caution: do not use metrics to compare teams. Problem spaces and technology stacks impose various degrees of complexity, hence comparing the flow between the mainframe team and the digital-natives team is unlikely to provide any insights. And don’t forget to consider building slack into your flow as Martin Fowler...