We are a company of software developers that decided to run the company itself similar to a typical software project. All company documents are put under version control, most things that can be automated are automated (or listed on a backlog and estimated for their business value), a wiki contains all relevant information and is continually updated and extended and, most important, everything is an issue. The word “issue” is the developer synonym for “ticket”, so what I’m really saying is: “Every activity in our company has a ticket number”. Just like you don’t change the source code of a software project without an issue that motivates the change, we don’t perform work for the company without a motivating ticket. This means that you can review the company’s progress, performance and efforts by at least three activity streams or history tracks:
- The commit history of the version control system tells the story from the viewpoint of documents. Company documents are mostly the beginning or the result of activity of our administration department. Typical documents that start processes are project orders or letters from official agencies. Typical documents that are created as a result of processes include invoices, filled in forms and more letters.
- The edit history of the wiki tells the story from the viewpoint of process learning. We document our actual administrative processes in a structured way that might be seen as “source code for humans”. Everything we change in our approach to process and create documents can be traced in this source code. Additionally created business processes indicate a growth in business scope or complexity – or the payback of “business process debt”, the administrative equivalent to “technical debt” in a software project.
- The resolution history of the ticket system tells the story from the actual footwork. Every activity has its ticket, so we can measure how much activity was necessary to run the company, where this activity was invested and how much regular versus extraordinary work occurred.
There are more “story lines” in our company and I could probably talk for days about how to read them and set them into context with one another, but in this blog post, I try to visualize only the footwork of the year 2022 for our small company by showing the ticket numbers. But before I can do that, we need one more piece of theory about our tickets:
We have two kind of tickets in our system:
- Manually created tickets accompany activities that occurred “without a schedule”. A human being recognized the need for some work and wrote a ticket to document the motivation and track the progress of this work.
- Automatically created tickets denote recurring activities that are handled by some form of automation in our company. We have developed a tool to manage the schedules of these “recurring activities”. Our job as humans is to recognize the recurring character of some of our activities, estimate a suitable schedule for it and tell the tool about it. The tool then creates tickets based on that schedule and we need to deal with them. The simplest form to deal with a recurring ticket is to close it as “won’t fix” because there is nothing to do in its regard yet.
Just keep in mind that manually created tickets always denote required activity while automatically created tickets “only” denote the need to check for required activity, but not always to perform it.
Let’s look at some numbers!
The most obvious ticket section is of course the tickets for our blog entries (you are reading BLOG-368). Because we publish one entry each week, there will be at least 52 tickets for 2022. In fact, we have fixed 54 tickets this year, with only one ticket manually created. There are not many surprises with such a strict schedule.
A less predictable topic is the purchase department (don’t be too impressed, the “department” is just its own section in the ticket system). Every purchase is tracked by its own ticket. In 2022, we had 113 purchase activities, with 94 of them manually created. This means that the non-automation ratio for our purchases is above 80 percent. We bought two different things every week and most of it was “on demand”.
The most important section of tickets for me as the CEO is the “business administration” section which encompasses all necessary non-specialized work to keep our company afloat. Let’s dissect it for the year 2022:
956 tickets were resolved over the course of the year. That’s a lot of work for a small company! Luckily, 865 tickets were created by our tool, so they don’t always require actual activity. But 91 tickets were things we needed to do but couldn’t anticipate this need (or else we would have created a schedule for it). This is two things per week that “surprised” us.
If you look at these numbers with a different mindset, you can see the effects of consequent automation: Our administration has an automation factor of 90 percent! We mostly deal with routine tasks and can rely on defined, documented and automated processes. That’s quite an achievement and I still remember the times when we had lower factors. They were more “interesting” (in the asian curse sense).
I want to add another perspective to these numbers: We also track our work time and assign it to different projects, with “administration” being one of them. In the year 2022, we booked approximately 600 person hours of work for “administration” of the company. So we spent circa 35 minutes on each ticket. This is a misleading number, because there were lots of tickets that require no more than a few minutes and some that can hog our attention for days. We also track detailed “time per ticket” numbers, but only use this data to extract “expected durations” for the most important and time-consuming tasks. This helps us to plan our administrative work around the customer project schedules.
I could write a lot more about our different topics in the adminstration section of our ticket system. We have identified around 20 distinguishable topics. But it would become more boring over time, so I close this blog entry with one last topic that is very important for an IT company: the “IT administration” or “operations”.
To keep our IT systems up and running, we worked on 48 different tickets, but only 13 of them were automatically created. This seems rather low when compared to the adminstration with around 1000 tickets, but it is very misleading. Our IT administration is nearly fully automated, so that routine work doesn’t create tickets, but starts automation runs (Jenkins builds, Ansible playbooks and such). The 48 tickets were additional work or, in the case of the 13 tickets, recurring work that requires human oversight and interference.
I’m glad that this number is as low as it is. It means that the IT runs smooth and rather silent. The 115 person hours booked for it tell the same story: Our IT is low maintenance. A tad more than 2 hours per week is an affordable price.
I hope this blog entry was entertaining enough to give you an idea of how we make things visible in our company. We use the data to test hypotheses, expose problems and track our improvement efforts. Without this data, we could only rely on assumptions, feelings and spotty memory. By reading the numbers, we (or at least I) get a feeling for the intricacies of the company that translate down to the day-to-day work and makes intuitive and appropriate management possible.
If you want to know more, feel free to leave a comment!
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