Work Investment and Allocation

How to make decisions around investment and validate if reality is aligned with expectations

José Caldeira avatar
Written by José Caldeira
Updated over a week ago

The Outcome view will help you understand where you’re investing your time and energy, and if those investments are aligned with the strategic intents of your engineering organization.

How to use Athenian to make explicit Investment decisions

Allocation Dashboard

You can define which Work Types you want to track, then see how much investment is going into each of these different areas.

Work Types are a combination of Jira types, Jira labels and Github labels. You can define which Work Types you see in the Allocation view in your settings.

You can also find an important metric which is the number of Pull Requests mapped to Jira items. This is a vital datapoint to ensure proper traceability of items, and a critical metric to track if you want to obtain some security compliance certifications.

You can also check the throughput of Pull Requests or Tickets over time, which is an important metric to validate team consistency, and whether your are increasing throughput.


🔎 What you to look for?

  • Where are your teams investing more time? How is quality or velocity data? How does that compare with your current investment?

  • Are teams investments aligned with expectations? Are they spending their time where they committed? Is that aligned with your expectations?

  • Has throughput changed dramatically? What changed?

  • Why is Pull Request mapping like that? How do you track changes in production? What happens when you need to trace back an incident to the origin?

🚀 Actions to improve

  • Use the Outcome view to make clear decisions on how much you wish to invest in specific areas of improvement.

  • Validate the investment you have been doing with other dashboards. Check if your investments are aligned with your goals.

  • Discuss with the team why traceability from Jira tickets to Pull Requests is important, and ensure you have the process in place to improve your PR Mapping.

  • Define a clear goal for PR mapping, so that you have better traceability.

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