FY20-Q4 Ops Section OKR: Improve MR rate more than 0% => 80%

Measured in MRs per product developers per month (MR rate)

Key results:

• Throughput => 80%; saw +8% improvement to MR rate (7.6 to 8.2) across Ops section FY20-Q3 vs FY20-Q4
  • Data source https://app.periscopedata.com/app/gitlab/533956/Development-Section-MR-Metrics
• Track all planning priority issues and make sure they are being completed on time (https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&label_name[]=planning%20priority) => 100%
• Key result: Maintain current developers to maintainers ratio - Nominate and add maintainers as we are increasing (BackEnd increase from X to Y, Frontend increase by X to Y) => 0%; dev to maintainer worsened for both FE an BE by about 17% FY20-Q3 to FY20-Q4

Partial Team Data for Reference:

Group	Benchmark	November	December	January
Monitor:APM	8.4 (July)	5.7	4.1	7.7
Monitor:Health	7.93	5.75	6.142	9.88
Monitor - total	8.45	5.76	4.33	8.67
Configure:Orchestration	11.88	11.25	6.375
Configure:System	6 (Dec)	2.8	6
Configure - total	12.44	12.625
Ops Section (groups) - Total	10.45	9.19

Notes:

• The benchmark is our peak from the last 6 months.

Retrospective

Good

• MR rate increased slightly over the quarter even though we on-boarded several new engineers, many took time off in December, and several engineering managers left the group.
• Managers in the group have visibility into their team's MR rate
• Feedback on MR rate tracking has been mostly neutral to positive

Bad

• Maintainer ratio worsened across the company
• Some teams in the group are seeing long review cycles > 2 weeks, which impacts productivity and morale
• Limited visibility into how MR rate breaks down by team, stage, etc. It is hard to analyze why the MR rate improved and if this is likely to continue.

Try

• Get better visibility into MR rate breakdown leveraging "universal MR rate dashboard" and/or other dashboarding improvement efforts
• Come up with a plan to improve review cycle time and friction.
• Get better visibility in to maintainer process and encourage more maintainers in the group as is deemed appropriate.