Setting more than less KPIs for Jira in most cases is considered a good thing that keeps team focus on goal and does not hurt, but there is always a trade-off that should be taken into consideration. Although SMART, the performance objectives might pose contradiction in major goals and when team productivity gets impacted as one of them, it is worth giving a thought whether some of the KPIs should be set at all in the first place.
KPIs to re-consider
For instance, Successful sprint KPI (ability to deliver on time and at quality all story points committed at the beginning of the Sprint) sounds great from project, capacity planning and delivery perspective but if set as a KPI it will inevitably make stakeholders more conservative about taking risks, starting work with some level of uncertainty and this might cause paradox of spending more time in planning phase than actual development for the sake of timely delivery. Similar impact might cause Velocity KPI associated with exact story points number that team is expected to complete with each Sprint.
Working approach
A good approach instead might be setting KPIs for Jira like Average story points delivered in multiple sprints as given under “Performance Objectives” add-on for Jira which will account tasks that get transitioned from one sprint to another. Often reason for that is late implementation of Stories for which there is not enough operational time to be reviewed, tested, stabilized and that’s expected when teams stretch themselves to achieve more and plan on their true capacity.
Explore more KPIs for Jira that will be a good start for your performance evaluation review strategy. And consider introduction of new SMART performance objectives, saving a lot of administration overhead by using Performance Objectives Add-on.
Start your 30 days free trial of Performance Objectives: Charts for Jira from Atlassian Marketplace.
