This week I showed my new JIRA key performance indicators (KPIs) to the ISO 9001 assessor for the first time. I have been keeping simple statistics for JIRA since installing it in 2006. For example the graph above tells me that we have been opening issues at a pretty constant rate since day one. For a while the number of issues in play (i.e. not closed) also rose. After about a year and a half however, the number of issues in play plateaued at just below 2,500 - our ability to close issues had caught up with our ability to open them. You can see the results of a purge this summer as we prepared for ISO 9001 assessment. The purge focussed on issues associated with obsolete projects, very old issues associated with live projects and issues assigned to staff no longer working with the company. The purge led to two sets of KPIs for JIRA – usage and hygiene.
The usage KPIs track number of projects being opened and closed, issues being opened and closed, users being added and removed and so on. The basic numbers are available from the administrators page and simple-to-create system-wide issue filters. My philosophy is that if JIRA is being used successfully, these numbers will show a positive or stable trend. If JIRA is dying at MRM London, then these numbers will show a negative trend and I will be able to spot this and take action as necessary.
The hygiene KPIs track projects without activity in the last six months, open issues over six months old, issues still assigned to users who have left recently, user accounts without activity in the last six months and so on. The new figures are more difficult to compile but increase the accuracy of the usage numbers above and reduce the need for purges in the future.
My philosophy is that a healthy, living system is preferable to a stagnant, dying one. The pre-ISO purge forced us to acknowledge and deal with elephants in the room; in certain respects we were almost in denial that a large number of old, unresolved, mis-assigned issues was not in itself an issue. Fortunately we saw sense and dealt with the issues and the issues behind the issues, too – issues such as under-staffing, an incomplete close-down process for projects and an incomplete exist process for people leaving the company.
The ISO 9001 assessor took the above on-board, nodded, made a few suggestions and said ‘carry on’. Result!
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Interestingly, the spur to action for all the common sense process improvements above was an ISO 9001 Continual Assessment Visit and *not* a crisis – and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of ISO.
