One thing I come across often at Itential is helping organizations to understand why it’s critical for network teams to start thinking about how network automation will not just help them to do their jobs more effectively, but how automation will benefit their business. In this blog series, I am breaking down the four key metrics that help teams measure the impact and build their business case for network automation:
By using these metrics, it becomes much easier to successfully communicate the business benefits of network automation with executive leadership. In this specific blog, I’ll be to take a deep dive into the second key metric, “efficiency & productivity” to help better understand why and how to calculate this metric.
Why Measure Efficiency & Productivity
The focus of utilizing this metric is to maximize automation productivity by prioritizing for solutions that require the least manual intervention throughout the automation. In short – the fewer people required to run the system, the better and most efficient.
One major benefit of measuring this metric is that it highlights the differences between automation approaches that require a high level of manual activities versus those that can automate tasks by providing automated data collection, data manipulation, and data analysis. This ensures that your team’s time is spent on other strategic initiatives instead of spending time on things automation should be handling.
How to Measure Efficiency & Productivity
This metric is primarily focused on the quantity of people involved in, and required to perform any manual steps that still remain in the automations.
To calculate this metric, you take the same number of activities that you use for the Workload Unit Cost metric, which is your total activities completed, and then divide that by the number of people that need to participate in any manual steps in the automations as seen in the following equation:
To be more specific, I’m talking about steps that require human interaction, such as data inputs (like adding configuration variables), or reviews (like pre- and post-checks), OS approvals, or interactions with OSS and ITSM to either retrieve or input data.
The 10% vs. 100%
This metric was designed around the concept of automation 10% of a process vs. 100% of the process. Some automation solutions focus entirely on automating the actual change to the network by creating a script that an engineer will use during a maintenance window (the 10% approach). What this approach fails to address are the many other tasks in the overall process that happen before and after the maintenance window, such as all of the planning, scheduling, preparation work, pre- and post- checks, and closeout (the 100% approach).
You can take a deeper look into this approach in a previous blog, “An End-to-End Network Automation Strategy is More Than CLI Scripting.”
How to Use this Metric
When you compare the efficiency & productivity metric for an automation that requires a high amount of manual effort to an automation that requires little-to-no manual effort, the benefits become obvious. To illustrate this, consider the differences between two approaches to the same problem.
- The automation system performs a closed-loop operation, receiving a trigger based on a network condition and implements the change without any human intervention.
- An engineer receives the alert, identifies the problem, determines the solution, develops and tests the code, and then uses a script to automate the change.
The first approach requires no human effort, except maybe an approval to confirm the change. The second approach is still automated, but it requires a much higher level of human effort. Approach #1 has an extremely high efficiency & productivity value, while the second approach scores much lower on efficiency & productivity because of the effort involved.
Efficiency & productivity is a powerful metric as it proves very useful in comparing different automation approaches, and it highlights the differences between those approaches in a way that will be meaningful to the business.
Be sure to keep an eye for the remaining blogs in our Key Metrics series breaking down each remaining metric, and check out the prequel overview blog as well. Also, get a more in depth look into all 4 key metrics and how to create a metric driven automation strategy, watch Itential’s on-demand webinar, “Measuring & Maximizing the Business Impact of Network Automation.”
Morgan Stern
Vice President, Automation Strategy ‐ Itential
Morgan Stern serves as the Vice President of Automation Strategy for Itential, where he is responsible for assisting Itential’s global customers in developing, implementing and deriving value from their automation strategies using the Itential Automation Platform. For the majority of his career, Morgan has focused on assisting large enterprise and service provider organizations in maximizing the business impact of new technologies as an architect, consultant, author, and industry speaker.
