1.2 Goals and Objectives
Having a clear vision of what you are trying to achieve and why is critical to your success with Compass. Here are a few recommended steps to help you set goals.
1.2.1 Define goals
Once you have spoken with key stkeholders and understand their needs, you’re ready to set some goals. A nice way to capture and communicate your goals is to include the associated objective and metric.
Example goals are included in the table below.
| Theme | Goal | Task | Measurement |
| Developer satisfaction | Reduce time spent searching information from 3 hours per day to 1 hour. | Populate the Compass component catalog with ownership, dependencies, and documentation. | Developer survey scores (monthly). |
| Developer productivity | Reduce lead time to provision infrastructure from 5 days to 2 hours. | Create Compass template for new software components that automates AWS provisioning. | The time to provision new components (quarterly). |
| Quality and security | Improve security vulnerability posture across software estate from an average of 400 open vulnerabilities to 50. | Integrate Snyk with Compass and track compliance through security scorecard. | Average number of unresolved vulnerabilities (quarterly). |
Once you’ve defined the goals for your Compass implementation, share these with your stakeholders for feedback and input before finalizing.
1.2.2 Evaluate the current state
Evaluating the current state within your organization will help quantify the success of your Compass rollout. It’s common for people to think they already know the current state - don’t fall into this trap. We recommend gathering both qualitative and quantitative measures that relate to your goals before starting your rollout. To evaluate the current state:
- Speak to developers within your organization and ask “how can we improve the way we deliver software in this company?” You will likely receive a long list of pain points, some of which will fall within the scope of your platform.
- Assess existing processes and note how many meetings people are required to attend, the preparation and reporting required, and the lead time required for these processes. Governance processes are usually a source of friction for software teams and are a good starting point.
- Developer surveys are a great way to baseline developer sentiment and focus areas prior to starting your Compass rollout. See the Developer Experience Survey play for guidance on how to do this.
Stakeholder needs identified during your initial meetings are a good source of information when understanding your current state. This activity should also include mapping any high-level business objectives that the implementation of Compass can contribute to, such as improving quality, reducing risk, and/or improving productivity.
A critical output of your evaluation is capturing a baseline of both qualitative and quantitative metrics that relate to the goals you identify. The baseline established during this process will be used to quantify and assess the impact your Compass rollout is having on your engineering organization.
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