The Delivery Performance and Experience Framework
The Delivery Performance and Experience Framework
A measurement model for professional services firms, built on the finding that team experience leads delivery outcomes by a measurable interval.
Why a new framework was needed
Software engineering has DORA and SPACE. Professional services has utilization, realization, and a set of financial ratios that describe what already happened.
Nothing existed that measured the leading half: the pressure on delivery teams, how it builds, and how long before it shows up in dates, quality, and margin.
We did not adapt a software framework, because consulting firms do not ship code. The work is scoped, staffed, delivered, and accepted, and it should be measured on those terms.
The four roots
- Velocity
- Throughput and schedule adherence against the firm's own committed plan, expressed as a ratio so it is comparable across engagement types.
- Quality
- First-pass acceptance and rework, measured on client acceptance rather than internal completion.
- Impact
- Value committed against value realized, so delivery is measured on outcome rather than output.
- Vitality
- The experience signal, drawn from validated instruments, aggregated and privacy-protected. This is the leading indicator.
The Root Index
The four roots combine into a single index using penalized, non-compensatory aggregation. A strong root cannot offset a weak one.
This is deliberate. Averaging would let excellent throughput hide collapsing quality, and in delivery that trade is never actually available. If one root is failing, the firm is failing on that root, and the index says so.
The lead-time finding
Vitality moves before delivery does. Our working model puts the interval at approximately four weeks.
We state that plainly as a model constant, not a measured law. It is the value the forecast uses, it is disclosed inside the product, and it is one of the things that will be validated and refined as data accumulates across firms.
We would rather tell you which numbers are asserted than let them borrow authority they have not earned.
The measurement instruments
The experience dimensions draw on published, validated research rather than questions we invented.
- Work engagement draws on the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale.
- Capacity and resources draws on the Job Demands-Resources model.
- Psychological safety draws on Amy Edmondson's research.
- Burnout risk draws on the Maslach Burnout Inventory general survey.
- Schedule adherence draws on SPI Research's Professional Services Maturity Benchmark.
These are instruments about people at work. They transfer across industries because the underlying constructs do.
The provenance rule
Every reference value in the product is labeled by what kind of claim it is.
- A benchmark comes from outside research about other organizations.
- A target is a judgment about what good looks like, either ours or your own configuration.
- A plan is your own committed baseline, where 1.0 is definitionally the plan.
Three words because they are three different claims. Calling an authored threshold a benchmark would let it impersonate an empirical one, and visual de-emphasis cannot fix a mislabel.
What the model refuses to do
- It will not show a metric it cannot compute honestly. When history is insufficient, it says so and states when it will be sufficient.
- It will not project from stale data. If the underlying data is older than the forecast horizon, the forecast abstains rather than projecting into a past it cannot see.
- It will not show individual sentiment. Team aggregates only, above a respondent floor, enforced in the database rather than by a display rule.
- It will not average a partial population and label it with the whole group's name.
Ownership
The Delivery Performance and Experience Framework, the Yaxbe Root Index, and the measurement methods implementing them are proprietary to Yaxbe.
We publish the model because a category needs a stated definition and we intend to be the ones who state it. The framework describes what to measure and why. Yaxbe is where it is measured.
Sources: SPI Professional Services Maturity Benchmark, industry attrition research; Utrecht Work Engagement Scale; Job Demands-Resources model; Amy Edmondson's psychological safety research; Maslach Burnout Inventory general survey.
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