Application development is a core activity in most IT departments. The role of IT staff in this area is to plan, coordinate, supervise, and support all activities related to design, development, and implementation of organizational information systems and software applications. The unique nature of this role requires performance metrics that are highly focused around application development tasks.


Benefits of IT Staff Performance Metrics

IT staff performance metrics are simply metrics that aim to quantify staff's technical, management and interpersonal skills in the workplace. IT staff performance metrics provide:

*An objective basis for measuring staff performance.
*Transparency in performance review.
*A basis for studying staff performance trends over the years.
*A basis to pinpoint staff's areas of weakness.
*A basis to benchmark IT staff performance against best practices and peers.


Unique Characteristics of IT Applications Development Positions

Staff participate in more project-oriented activities. The nature of the job requires staff to work either in a single or in multiple projects at a time. From planning to writing and fixing code, application development tasks require interactions with senior executives, project stakeholders and colleagues. Staff, therefore, need to have good people skills, a strong understanding of project management, as well as attention to detail. Metrics focused on project performance, project progress, and communication are particularly relevant to this group of staff. However, the degree to which a staff member needs to demonstrate these skills depends on their role, seniority, speciality, and aspirations for promotion.

The job requires creativity and self-motivation. IT applications development staff are measured more on quality than quantity. Creativity is a must in their day-to-day job, which means they need to be given a certain amount of flexibility to plan their tasks and need to be highly self-motivated in return. Consider an entry-level programmer versus an expert programmer. They both write code that computers can understand, but the latter individual writes code that humans can understand. Metrics such as "Usability of Code and "Efficiency of Code are, therefore, relevant to assess the degree of creativity and self-motivation of programmers and application developers at various stages of their career path.

Staff need to be thick-skinned. The quality-orientation in the work means that the measurement of quality is largely subjective on the part of the stakeholders or business units. In many cases, business users do not know what they want. Even after requirements have been signed off, they still come back with new requirements, change their mind or do not like what they asked for. Therefore, IT application development staff should allow room to incorporate business users' requirements and need to be prepared to live with uncertaintly and constant criticism.


Metrics to Evaluate IT Application Development Staff's Performance

Application development staff performance metrics can be grouped into the following four categories:

* Productivity metrics: These metrics measure the productivity and efficiency of staff in planning, designing, researching, coding, and testing software.
* Quality metrics: These metrics measure the quality of the developed applications such as error rates, usability, and client satisfaction with the end product.
* Expertise metrics: These metrics keep track of staff certification status and their depth of knowledge in various technology and business processes.
* Soft/Interpersonal skills metrics: These metrics measure staff communication, teamwork, attitude, presentation, and training skills.

Info-Tech Research Group has designed an Excel tool to aid in the performance measurement job. The "IT Application Development Staff Performance Measurement Tool has the following features:

* Defines metrics under each of the previously mentioned four categories.
* Provides recommendations on the data type and methods for collecting each metric.
* Calculates the metric value for each objective metric.


Recommendations

The following is a general guideline on how to use the list of metrics provided in the downloadable tool to measure IT application development staff's performance:

1.Identify vital metrics. Based on the nature of the task, some metrics will receive more attention than others. For instance, organizations which are project based should focus on metrics such as "number of projects completed on time within a given timeframe and "difference between expected and actual project deadline. Organizations which are operational task based should focus on metrics such as "% of total working hours spent writing and fixing code and "% of total working hours spent installing and upgrading software. The latter metrics can also be used at project-focused organizations, but they should be measured project-by-project rather than as part of ongoing operational activity. Before deploying the tool to measure staff's performance, identify a few vital metrics that suit enterprise requirements better.

2.Customize metrics when required. Metrics provided in the list may require alteration to align with the nature of tasks that IT application development staff are engaged in at an enterprise.

*Alter definitions of metrics. As an example, when measuring staff's performance in writing code for a project, use "% total working hours spent writing and fixing code in project 1 instead of the more simple "% total working hours spent writing and fixing code. The former definition is very specific to a project, whereas the latter indicates performance in everyday operational tasks.

*Change the data type where necessary. Based on the degree of importance of a skill to move things forward, enterprises sometimes encourage rigorous assessment of soft skill metrics which are generally considered subjective. Take Enterprise A, where the communication skill of IT application development staff plays a major role in getting things done. In such cases, enterprises may rely upon objective measures as opposed to subjective measures of the staff's communication skills and design quantitative methods to measure the "effectiveness of verbal and written communication of a staff member.

3.
Define the level of expectation of each metric value. Define the expected value of each metric based on the seniority of the IT application development staff member. For instance, when it comes to planning the development of a given application:

*An entry-level staff member is not expected to have any background in planning an IT application. They are in a learning phase and any achievement in this area should be scored as extra credit.
*A junior staff member is expected to gradually develop the skills of planning an application by collaborating with senior staff. They are encouraged to provide recommendations in the planning phase.
*A senior staff member is expected to be either an expert or have several years of experience in the planning and designing of applications and providing effective leadership in application development/implementations.

Ensure the expectation level is clearly stated in the job description or explained to staff metric-by-metric when they start their jobs. Be sensitive to experience levels. For example, if a senior staff member is expected to spend 10% of their weekly working hours in writing code, and the "% time spent writing code metric shows they spends 25% of their time in this activity, then try to find answers to the following:

- Was the time allocation reasonable?
- Did the employee go off course against direction and spend more time doing other work instead of what they were supposed to be doing?
- Did the business demands shift and an informal task reallocation occur mid-cycle?

4. Design survey questions for subjective measures. A survey is a convenient and well established practice to gather data for subjective metrics. The survey should be distributed among team members to collect as many data points as possible for the same question. This reduces the risk of false conclusions. Info-Tech recommends a six-point response scale for each survey question and, where possible, labeling the scale with appropriate text to ensure clarity of the scale. For instance:

How would you rank your application development manager's depth of knowledge in project management methodologies?

1. Extremely poor

2. Very poor

3. Poor

4. Good

5. Very good

6. Excellent

For in-depth knowledge on how to design IT staff's performance metrics, refer to the McLean Report research note,"How to Set and Use IT Staff Performance Metrics.


5. Metrics measurement should be independent of external influences. Metrics listed in the tool are ultimately to measure the person, not the process. Factors which are external to staff performance (such as faulty processes, business/management decisions, complexity of projects, etc.) may have influenced results beyond the action of the individual. Be sure to assess these external influences when interpreting results and assigning final performance scores.


Bottom Line

Traditional staff performance metrics, being generic in nature, fail to highlight the characteristics that differentiate IT staff from non-IT staff. They also do not deliver a reliable tool when IT leaders need to make decisions on staff promotions, staffing levels, resource allocation, and performance monitoring. Use this note and associated tool to measure the performance of IT applications development staff.