Here are 5 KPI examples to demonstrate great progress without getting anything done:

  1. Meters of Ethernet cable per staff member. Companies with highly skilled engineers don’t use WiFi - simply a security nightmare. To make sure that everyone knows how skilled you are, count the meters of Ethernet cable on a weekly basis. Make sure that your weekly delivery of Ethernet cables is attached to the network. If your Ethernet cable dealer is out of supply, simply fire someone. Just make sure you never have to divide by zero - your Excel dashboard could explode.

  2. Enforce a by-character code commits. Unsafe and insecure code is a big problem after all. If anyone is able to write a simple “hello world” in less than 8 hours, it is reasonable to assume that this piece of code is a security nightmare and that the computer it was programmed on has to be removed by a hazmat removal service. Further, this is a great way to track progress and bill external contractors by the second characters written/day. Besides improved code quality, this will ensure that number of daily commits will skyrocket without a tedious thing called work!

  3. Number of external libraries and software packages used. We all know that reusing existing libraries is the only correct way to develop software and do data science. What other people wrote is surely better tested. Further, we made sure that we don’t hire anyone competent. Therefore, make sure to see at least a monthly double digit growth of external libraries in use.

  4. Number of Post-Its used per week. We all know that agile development is the answer to everything. To prove that your department is the most agile, count the number of Post-Its used per week. If there is no double digit growth, you sure are not agile enough. Developers will be so busy to write on Post-Its that we can get rid of all notebooks, keyboards and servers.

  5. Number of ping pong tables and hammocks in the office. We all know that sitting on chairs in big offices with a maximum of two people sharing an office is a decadent and unproductive way of running a company. The only way to make engineers more productive is to put them in battery cages and offer them relaxing breaks. Just make sure that hammocks are installed according to some building standard so that they don’t fall down and hit an engineer who accidentally wrote a whole line of code without committing intermediate steps. Further, ping pong balls can be quite fast and probably cause a health hazard. Make sure that they are used for nothing but press pictures. Your monthly ping pong table and hammock count should increase steadily, just be aware that you may have to rent another building - nothing is to expensive for productivity increase of your brightest minds.