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ScienceSoft’s Success Criteria and KPIs for Software Development Projects
In IT since 1989, we bring our best practices to accurately measure software development efficiency, continuously improve service quality, and ensure that the deliverables meet our clients’ highest expectations.
Success Measurement at ScienceSoft: Key Aspects
At ScienceSoft, success measurement starts with an in-depth analysis of customer needs and priorities. Using this knowledge, we create tailored sets of objectives and key results (OKRs) to evaluate success throughout the project lifecycle. Consistent OKR monitoring helps ensure that our development service is fully aligned with customer goals. We regularly revise success metrics and proactively collect stakeholder feedback to identify potential risks and areas of improvement.
Major Challenges and Risks of Success Measurement
Software development vendors often overlook their clients’ unique business goals and constraints. Trying to spur project progress, they jump into development with no clear problem statement and only high-level, deliverable-limited requirements in mind. Misinterpreting client expectations poses the risk of setting too general, ambiguous, and poorly-ranked success criteria misaligned with the actual goals. It inevitably creates a gap between the client’s and the vendor’s understanding of success, ultimately leading to inefficient allocation of vendor efforts and growing customer dissatisfaction.
A vendor’s immature collaboration processes and opaque workflows are another common pain point that may complicate success measurement. In particular, the failure to openly and proactively communicate with a client’s stakeholders prevents effective success evaluation and change management. This challenge is especially prevalent in long-term projects with a high degree of uncertainty, e.g., digital transformation projects and Agile software development.
How We Measure Success: The Approach Refined Through 35 Years in IT
There are two key measures of software development success: service quality and client satisfaction. Customers measure service quality to assess cooperation efficiency in terms of business benefits. In turn, vendors calculate client satisfaction to evaluate success through the delivered value. But the only way to measure project success objectively is to reveal dependencies between the two criteria and track them in combination. We do it by exploring our client’s success vision and setting adequate OKRs for joint success control.
Below, ScienceSoft’s experts describe the key steps that enable objective and transparent success measurement and ensure excellent customer experience in our software development projects.
Step 1. Discovering the client’s vision
Already at the project initiation stage, we conduct an in-depth analysis of our client’s business to understand where the company is heading, its challenges, the restraining factors, and what our customer considers a success.
The research findings help us engineer the requirements for the deliverables and prioritize specific quality criteria to achieve the expected results in the way best aligned with our client’s definition of success.
Step 2. Mapping success criteria and KPIs to track project health
For each client, we devise a tailored map of success criteria and quantitative KPIs, ranked according to their weight for success and impact on customer goals. Our project management experts usually group the criteria into four major categories:
Step 3. Joint review and feedback gathering
Under a fixed-price Waterfall model, success is easy to measure at the project level: if a client receives the solution on time, on spec, and on budget — it’s a win. T&M Agile development requires a more thorough, granular approach to success assessment.
In our Agile projects, we measure success at a sprint level and flexibly adjust the OKR system when customer requirements evolve. Our experts stay in close touch with the clients’ management teams to regularly report our achievements, review and tune the success evaluation framework, and collect stakeholder feedback on the project performance for prompt improvements.
Ongoing success measurement is an indispensable component of our Agile ceremonies:
We promote the practice of sprint satisfaction scoring by our team and the customer to quantify sprint success and analyze the efficiency of workflow improvement steps over time. In addition, our teams score their confidence to meet the sprint goal on a weekly basis. It helps promptly identify the stumbling blocks and focus on the areas that matter most.
Step 4. Driving ongoing improvements
Continuous service advancement is at the very heart of ScienceSoft’s success measurement culture. We steadily monitor project health and our clients’ subjective cooperation experiences and strive to use all possible improvement opportunities to meet — and exceed — customer expectations. An involved and customer-goal-oriented tech partner, we grow our expertise following the tech space evolution and our clients’ unique needs, investing in the resources and domain-specific expertise important for our clients’ success.
What Our Clients Appreciate about ScienceSoft
Our daily meetings with the team have been great – they never fail to keep us well-informed. They also regularly ask for feedback to better cater to our needs, and that’s how I know this partnership will last.
The team is very professional, well-organized, and is always on top of the finer details. We're impressed by their passion for solving problems and implementing improvements. This is exactly what a long-term, harmonious partnership should look like.
Harutyun Melikiyan
CEO
We appreciate the transparency of the project activities, which the team ensured by regular and thorough reporting, and effective communication with the stakeholders. We always stayed tuned on the progress and could anticipate and mitigate potential risks.
