Engineering Metrics That Matter to Your Bottom Line

Many tech organizations struggle to align their engineering efforts with their business goals and understand the impact of their development work on their financial performance. In this blog, we discuss how the new Business Alignment report in Harness SEI solves this challenge by linking engineering efforts to specific business outcomes within your organization.

The Business Alignment Report helps you visualize where your teams are investing the majority of their effort and assists them in prioritizing their time effectively. This report helps not only the engineering leaders in analyzing the allocation across various business goals but also the financial charter where they are expected to map these business goals with their respective costs.

SEI now offers the capability to see the work accomplished across various business goals with the flexibility of choosing the measuring unit suitable for the organization.

How can this benefit Engineering leaders?

Categorization of Efforts

One of the most significant challenges in software capitalization is accurately differentiating between capitalized and non-capitalized work. The Business Alignment report provides a clear, data-driven method to categorize engineering efforts, ensuring the accuracy of financial reports.

• Capitalized work: Easily identify and track efforts related to new feature development and significant enhancements.
• Non-capitalized work: Clearly separate maintenance, bug fixes, and other operational activities that don't qualify for capitalization.

Resource Allocation Insights

Finance teams can leverage the report to gain a granular view of resource allocation across different categories of work:

• Track Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs) assigned to capitalized vs. non-capitalized work.
• Monitor resource distribution across various projects and initiatives.
• Identify trends in resource allocation over time to inform future budgeting and planning.

How can this benefit Finance teams?

Cost Association

By combining resource allocation data with individual cost information, finance teams can generate comprehensive software capitalization reports with ease:

• Associate specific costs with capitalized and non-capitalized work categories.
• Calculate precise capitalization amounts based on actual resource utilization.
• Generate detailed breakdowns of capitalized costs for auditing and reporting purposes.

Streamlined Reporting

The Business Alignment report simplifies the creation of software capitalization reports:

• Automate the categorization of work and resource allocation.
• Reduce manual data entry and potential errors in reporting.
• Save time and resources in preparing financial reports.

Analyzing Work Distribution

The drilldown view in the Business Alignment report enables you to see the breakdown of the effort invested across initiatives (work items or tickets) and the distribution of work across different categories for each FTE/ contributor. The report provides two different drill-down views.

1. Drilldown by tickets
2. Drilldown by FTEs/ contributors

You can use these drilldown views to visualize data related to the effort invested across different business categories, such as new features and defects. This helps you understand work distribution, resource allocation requirements, and bottlenecks in your team and thus allows you to generate reports for continuous data for individuals and teams.

Correlating Engineering and Business Efforts

Connecting Technical Tasks to Business Objectives

The ability to directly connect technical tasks to business objectives is crucial for leaders who want to optimize their engineering investments and drive strategic growth. 

Whether you're a CTO looking to demonstrate the value of your team's work or a CFO aiming to maximize ROI on tech spending, the Business Alignment report provides the exact data-driven alignment insights you need.

Beyond Technical Insights: A Finance-Focused Perspective

This report provides valuable data for CTOs and engineering executives, but its use cases can extend beyond the engineering team. As we mentioned earlier it ca now make financial reporting easier and more accurate for use cases such as generating software capitalization reports.

With this report, CFOs and finance teams gain unprecedented visibility into engineering efforts from a financial perspective. It covers key areas such as:

• More accurate software capitalization reporting
• Data driven insights that could help you improve the resource allocation and budgeting in your organization
• Ability to track return on investment for engineering initiatives
• Better alignment between engineering targets and financial goals

Closing thoughts

As companies continue to find a way to correlate tech objectives with business outcomes, measuring the Business Alignment metrics effectively can help bridge that gap. The metrics you get out of the BA report in SEI are crucial for managing software development and finances effectively. 

This not only streamlines reporting processes but also fosters greater collaboration between engineering and financial teams, ultimately driving better business outcomes.

Ready to transform how your organization measures and reports on engineering efforts? Contact Harness Support to try this out today and take the first step towards more aligned, data-driven decision-making using the Business Alignment report on Harness SEI.