An organisation’s ability to ship products fast and frequently depends on its software practices. While all organisations have ‘an ability’ to deliver, they’re unlikely to have the metrics that measure their performance with best practice. Through our work with over 150 New Zealand SaaS businesses, we've established those metrics and, from them, built a unique Improvement Model that can help you too. We can establish your baseline performance and help your team get up to speed too.

We use our Improvement Model to benchmark the current state of your delivery capability and identify which high-value levers to pull to increase velocity and flow. Improving your software practices help address challenges such as:

• Spending more time fixing bugs than delivering features
• Software releases are cumbersome & slow
• Taking too much effort & cost to onboard customers
• Uncertainty in scaling the product for a rapidly-growing customer base

Our Improve Practices engagement is delivered in two phases:

Discovery

We learn how your business and product works and the problems you face, baseline the maturity and quality of your software practices and identify the priority actions you need to take

Implementation

We help you uplift your team’s ability in the software delivery practices prioritised during Discovery. It usually takes about 40-60 hours of coaching and mentoring to get you on the path to ‘excellence’

The Improvement Model is a framework for understanding the software delivery capability gap against benchmarks. The benchmarks are derived from 8 high-level measures, 35 sub-measures and 278 criteria (see our Improve Practices playbook for more detail).

The scores illustrated in the spider web diagram are based on analysis of more than 100 businesses and represent the most comprehensive performance metric for software delivery in New Zealand. The average ability score is about 50% of the highest and/or best-practice score. That’s some gap!

We think this represents a fantastic improvement opportunity for the nation’s businesses.

Our experience tells us that organisations that go through the programme achieve three important outcomes:

• Practices improve – shift up from baseline measure
• Flow of value improves – change in business outcomes (eg. onboarding time)
• Visibility improves – the Improvement Model provides tangible evidence of a shift in ability

There’s also a positive ‘ratchet-effect’ on the teams and individuals; as their work becomes easier and more rewarding, they become more engaged in learning, collaborate more effectively, focus more on Continuous Improvement and become a happier, higher-performing team.

We help organisations uplift their practices in categories covering quality, flow, feedback and the delivery of value:

• Project v product-based software development
• Test Automation
• DevOps/Continuous Delivery
• SaaS-style Architectures
• Infrastructure as Code… & more

Our Improve Practices playbook provides much more detail about individual best practices and sets the scene for understanding your situation.

If you’re interested in measuring your capability gap and starting on a journey to excellence, call us. We’d love to help another New Zealand business get up to speed.

Note: The Improvement Model was created to deliver a capability uplift programme called 'Build for Speed'. It was sponsored by Callaghan Innovation until June 2021. Our Improve Practices Engagement is identical but is no longer sponsored.