Building High-Performance Software Delivery Teams with the PRISM Framework

Background

Building high-performance, resilient teams is no accident. It requires the right foundational capabilities, behaviors, and processes to produce the best outcomes. Regrettably, there is no definitive playbook for building high-performing teams.

DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) has attempted to measure software delivery performance using a few metrics. While these metrics provide some insights, they focus narrowly on software delivery aspects, potentially overlooking other crucial factors in building, collaborating, delivering, and operating software in production.

Having worked with diverse organizations—including product companies, startups, large banks, and governments—I have seen the common challenges they face. Based on this experience, developed a framework to evaluate development teams' maturity and introduce foundational practices to build high-performing teams.

Introducing PRISM: Performance and Resilience Index for Software-delivery Maturity.

Introduction

PRISM is a comprehensive framework designed to evaluate and enhance the maturity and performance of software delivery teams. It stands on seven key pillars:

• Team Organization

• Engineering Enablement

• Delivery Flow

• Rugged Score

• Chaos Tolerance

• Ops Capability

• Team Elasticity

By assessing these core areas, PRISM can provide actionable insights and metrics to guide teams toward achieving high performance and resilience in software delivery.

PRISM comes with:

• A framework to guide the incorporation of foundational capabilities

• A scorecard to assess team maturity

• A set of metrics for ongoing team performance evaluation

These components work together to generate a comprehensive PRISM Score.

Note: I have made this framework available as open source. Your feedback and contributions are most welcome. For more details, please refer to the section at the bottom.

The Seven Pillars of PRISM

1. Team Organization

Effectiveness in managing work from requirements to delivery, with a clear engagement model, appropriate governance, and ensure balance between burn and value delivered is acceptable.

• Team Charter: Defines the purpose of the team within the organization, lists the team members and their roles, describes near-term and long-term objectives and establishes agreed ways of working.

• Engagement Model: Defines front door for internal and external customers to request services.

• Service Catalog: Clear service catalog describing the services offered with SLAs, pricing defined where applicable.

• Flow Management: Processes for managing work using Agile, Lean, or other frameworks.

• Visibility & Alignment: Approach for making work visible to stakeholders and ensuring alignment with organizational goals using methods like OKRs, Quarterly Business Reviews, Value Stream Management Methodologies, Program Increments, etc

• Team Communication: Clearly established channels for internal & external team communication.

KPIs:

• Customer satisfaction scores for service delivery.

• Percentage of work items delivered on time.

• Number of escalations or missed SLAs.

• Frequency and quality of stakeholder updates.

• Team communication effectiveness survey results.

2. Engineering Enablement

Availability of the right tools, environments, safety guardrails, standards, and procedures.

• Tools & Gears: Availability of right tools that are accessible and performant for the team’s job at hand. These could include an IDE for the developer, a performance testing tool for the QA Engineer, or a modeling framework for the Architect.

• Environments: Automated, repeatable dev, build, and test environments including using modern approaches like Devcontainers, Codespaces, Nix, etc

• Standards & Procedures: Clear, documented standards and processes to assist developers in performing day-to-day activities, from creating a new repo to raising a change to production.

• Safety Guardrails: Established guardrails, preferably automated, to prevent developers from affecting general safety, functionality, and introducing vulnerabilities in deliverables

• Developer Surveys: Periodic surveys to enable open communication, gather feedback on the ways of working, aspects causing burnouts and facilitate for actions to improve identified issues and opportunities

KPIs:

• Time to set up a new development environment.

• Percentage of human errors could have been addressed through guardrails / checkpoints.

• Number of critical vulnerabilities detected before production.

• Developer onboarding time.

3. Delivery Flow

Friction on the assembly line directly impacts team productivity. Ensure appropriate tools and processes are available for a seamless flow.

• Automated Pipelines: Standardized, automated build & deployment, rollback process enabled through pipelines with necessary controls for governance.

• Change Process Efficiency & Agility: maturity of an organization's change management process, ranging from non-existent to highly efficient and automated

• Change Impact Assessment: Ability to objectively assess and communicate the potential impact of changes using data-driven methods through such as dependency graphs, code mininig etc

• Service interruption: Ability to deploy changes to production with no / minimal disruption for external as well as internal teams

KPIs:

• Downtime of the developer infra such as build system, source control repository, etc

• Lead time for changes.

• Number of failed changes in production

4. Rugged Score

Team's ability to produce cyber-safe, reliable, resilient software that customers can use confidently

• Safety Culture: Safety and security requirements identified from the beginning and system is designed, built, and tested accordingly through the life cycle.

• Vulnerability Management: Ability to react quickly to zero-day vulnerabilities and roll out fixes to production. Having active system / process in place to monitor for threats.

• Safety and Security Testing: Capability to verify accuracy, security, and robustness through reliable testing methodologies.

• Security Incident Recovery Plan: Clear action plan for communicating with stakeholders, establishing action teams, and identifying recovery plans and kill switches on the event of a security incident / data breach

• Off Boarding - Systamatic removal of access to systems / assets for the outgoing member

KPIs:

• Time to identify and remediate vulnerabilities.

• Frequency of security drills and testing.

• Number of security incidents and response times.

• Percentage of systems passing security audits.

• Data breach incidents

• Data breaches prevented

5. Chaos Tolerance

Ability to handle chaos - losing a key member, introducing a new tool, process change, or requirements change.

• Attrition Management: How well the team can cope with the loss of a key member and how knowledge is accumulated and shared.

• Process Change: Ease of changing or introducing new processes in the team.

• Technology Disruption Resilience: Culture of grasping and adapting to changes in their space, experimenting, and adapting proactively.

KPIs:

• Time to recover from the loss of a key team member.

• Frequency and impact of process changes.

• Number of new tools/technologies successfully adopted.

• Percentage of team members trained in new processes/tools.

6. Ops Capability

Managing systems in production requires its own process, tools, and skills. Is the team capable of running systems in production?

• Observability: Equipped with necessary tools to observe the system in production and quickly identify issues before customers are impacted.

• Production Incident Management: Clearly documented process, tools for issue triaging, external team engagement, escalation, communication, and postmortem.

• Automation: Runbooks and standard operating procedures to manage systems in production.

• Production Guardrails: Prevent human errors through necessary review processes enforced through people or automation.

• Reliability and Cost Management: Continual improvement of availability, security, performance, and observability, with systems to monitor usage and identify cost-saving opportunities.

KPIs:

• Mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR) incidents.

• Percentage of incidents detected before customer impact.

• Frequency and effectiveness of incident postmortems.

• Operational cost savings identified and implemented.

7. Team Elasticity

Team's ability to scale to manage delivery requirements. How long does it take for a new member to become productive? What practices are in place to quickly rampup the capacity of the team when needed?

• Developer Onboarding & offboarding: Clearly documented onboarding documents to help new members quickly come up to speed, and offboarding procedures for necessary knowledge handovers

• Interview Process: Clear interview process to recruit ideal candidates using structured methods and practices.

• Cross-Training : Systematic practices for cross-training team members to build a versatile team that can adapt to changing needs

• Flexible Work Arrangements: Flexible work arrangements, such as remote work with clear operational guidelines (eg, Remote Manifesto) or flexible hours, to attract a wider pool of talent and accommodate diverse needs.

KPIs:

• Time to onboard new team members to productivity.

• Satisfaction scores from new hires on the onboarding process.

• Time to offboard team members.

• Interview-to-hire ratio.

Evaluating Team Maturity

Here is an example scorecard created to demonstrate how this framework can be used to measure the current maturity and performance of a team.

Scorecard

Squad Name: Alpha 1

1: Team Organization

Overall Score: 🟢 4

2: Engineering Enablement

Overall Score: 🟡 3

3: Delivery Flow

Overall Score: 🟢 4

4: Rugged Score

Overall Score: 🟠 2

5: Chaos Tolerance

Overall Score: 🟡 3

6: Ops Capability

Overall Score: 🟢 4

7: Team Elasticity

Overall Score: 🟡 3

Legend: 🔴 1 - Critical 🟠 2 - Needs Improvement 🟡 3 - Satisfactory 🟢 4 - Good 🟢 5 - Excellent

Overall PRISM Score: 🟡 3 (Satisfactory)

Average Score: 3.29 (Rounded to 3)

Legend: 🔴 1 - Critical 🟠 2 - Needs Improvement 🟡 3 - Satisfactory 🟢 4 - Good 🟢 5 - Excellent

Open Source

The PRISM framework is now open source. Your feedback and contributions are most welcome.

https://github.com/avles/prism

Roadmap

• Finalize Pillars and Elements: Once sufficient feedback is received from the community, finalize the definition and structure of each pillar and its corresponding elements.

• Develop Implementation Guides: For each element, provide an implementation guide. This guide will include best practices, recommended tools, and playbooks or templates to assist teams. For example, the guide for creating a Team Charter will outline the process, suggest popular tools, and provide playbooks/templates to assist with implementation.

• Companion Application: Develop an application powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to support implementing PRISM. This app will assist in setting up squads, assessing maturity through scorecards, and act as an engineering lead/senior engineer answering questions about ways of working, standard operating procedures, etc.