Goals and Profiles

Taking a planned approach to building a software team is very similar to building software itself. First of all, you must determine your business “requirements” and establish a vision of the team you want, just as with software you need a vision that is aligned with business and marketing requirements. Next, you need to develop a design or blueprint of the team you envision, just as with software you need a design. Finally, you need to implement that design to build a team and iteratively improve it over time, just as software gets built, maintained, and enhanced.

Whether you want to build a new team or improve an existing one, the first step is to lay out a vision and a plan. This section describes how you can use metrics to establish targets for new or existing teams.

Set Key Goals

When you want to build a new team or improve an existing team, in a metrics-based approach, the first step is to determine the key “business” or organization goals for the team. The goals should be trackable with metrics you have in place. Once goals are established, you can use them to guide your personnel decisions, and you can track the metrics to analyze the results.

For example, your team goal might be to increase the number of new users or improve the quality of your software. For these goals you could use Response Metrics like Wins or Penalties. Alternative team goals might be to increase productivity or teamwork, in which case you could use Skill Metrics like Points or Assists, ...

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