Hello everyone! My name is Areti Bojaxhiu and I am a PHP Developer and metrics architect on TeachPitch. This is my third year working with this online platform and with almost 9 years of experience in software development.
TeachPitch was founded as a solution to the problem of the growing abundance of online learning resources combined with the time and budget constraints that teachers face. Seeing the growth of the TeachPitch platform, it was necessary to start implementing an effective metrics system. We want to grow TeachPitch by delivering on our brand promise to “belong anywhere” by connecting teachers with each other, and by giving every teacher a good reason to talk about TeachPitch.
When a company promises and delivers on quality, there is a good chance that customer satisfaction and retention will be higher. But paving the road to success depends on companies being well-informed about their own business. They achieve that knowledge by developing and utilizing effective metrics. TeachPitch did it!
Why Do We Need Metrics?
Metrics are used to drive improvements and help businesses focus their people and resources on what’s important. The range of metrics that companies can employ vary from those that are mandatory – for legal, safety or contractual purposes – to those that track increases in efficiency, reductions in complaints, greater profits and better savings.
Overall, metrics should reflect and support the various strategies for all aspects of the organization, including finance, marketing, competition, standards, or customer requirements and expectations. Metrics indicate the priorities of the company and provide a window on performance, ethos and ambition.
Benefits of Metrics
To derive the most benefit from metrics, it is important to keep them simple as TeachPitch does. Defining a metric is similar to telling a joke – if you have to spend too much time explaining it then it will not work.
Good metrics will:
- Drive the strategy and direction of the organization
- Provide focus for an organization, department or employee
- Help make decisions
- Drive performance
- Change and evolve with the organization
- Produce good internal and external public relations
- How to Implement Effective Metrics
- Increase return on investment (ROI)
- Reduce costs
Often sets of software metrics are communicated to software development teams as goals. So the focus becomes:
- Reducing the lines of codes
- Reducing the number of bugs reported
- Increasing the number of software iterations
- Speeding up the completion of tasks
TeachPitch is focused on those metrics to help software developers reach more important goals such as improving software usefulness and user experience.
One of my favorite quotes about metrics is: “Use the tools you have as an IT leader to prove that you can be a business champion”.
But that is a blog post for another time. If you enjoyed this post, I’d be very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, G+ or LinkedIn. Thank you!