Your engineering org works tirelessly to develop new features and updates. However, in today's business world it's not enough just knowing about them; data must back them up; yet getting that data may not always be straightforward. Are You Struggling with Demonstrating Organization Productivity and Deliveries Progress to Board Members? Engineering management ERP software could provide the answers.
Engineering management ERP software allows project teams to monitor projects' current condition and progress over time, helping ensure all involved remain aligned in an effort whether working internally with teams or external clients. These solutions help ensure everyone involved in complex endeavors are on board from day one of a project's inception to completion. In this article, we'll outline what engineering management ERP software is and some of the top options available to engineering organizations.
What Is Engineering Management Software?
Management needs can differ depending on what kind of team is under your management; thus, special software tailored specifically for engineering projects should be utilized when planning and organizing these endeavors.
Engineering management ERP software provides data-driven insight into your engineering organization's developer experience, efficiency and alignment with business goals - helping to inform better decisions and produce tangible results.
Software designed specifically to manage engineering projects can prove beneficial to all parties involved -- from upper-level management and stakeholders through stakeholders and engineers themselves. You will improve time management and organization while streamlining collaboration and assignment tasks and reducing costs and risks; not to mention improving communication channels while increasing speedy file access.
Common Engineering Management Challenges
As an idea of what engineering managers might face, consider these Engineering management challenges:
Reaching An Equilibrium Between Efficiency And Quality
One of the more frequently used metrics among developers today is velocity -- or how quickly new products can be released -- but teams could focus more on quality control to deliver projects sooner and minimize time lost while developing features.
Leaning too heavily one way will result in serious issues; hastening things out the door faster usually means compromising quality; while moving slowly but steadily can only work over the longer haul. Engineering management ERP tools allow you to monitor how teams across your company are performing across the board, helping ensure an optimal balance between speed and quality.
Setting Goals And Monitoring Progress
Making plans may seem straightforward on paper, but making them happen requires dedication from leaders who ensure that teams have clear objectives and measurable benchmarks to strive towards.
At times it can be challenging to accurately gauge developer progress toward goals quickly enough or identify ways in which you could help them advance faster. Some engineering management tools offer Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) features to assist leaders with creating plans and actually making them happen for their organization.
Manage Productivity And Prevent Burnout
Workload spikes are common across any organization, especially newer ones. Since engineers frequently manage multiple tasks at the same time, extra hours may need to be put in during busy periods; while at other times there may not be as much work.
Managers face the daunting challenge of striking an equilibrium between output and burnout. Most engineering management tools provide details about who's working on what tasks, so leaders will have access to information needed for workload balancing to prevent dev burnout.
Popular Engineering ERP Software Management Tools
Engineering management platforms can be invaluable tools in meeting these challenges head on, but how should you choose one? To assist your search, here are eight popular engineering management ERP software tools that may assist in this regard.
Jira
Jira is an agile project management and bug tracking solution originally intended for remote development teams. Although numerous companies worldwide have adopted Jira since it first came onto the scene, its roots as an issue tracking, agile testing case management tool make Jira particularly valuable to engineering organizations worldwide.
SourceLevel
SourceLevel offers data and analyses from GitLab and GitHub such as throughput, lead time and engagement rates to allow engineering operations teams to better track all parts of their delivery pipeline, speed up delivery times and enhance engineering processes more rapidly.
Typo is a ERP software engineering management tool designed to increase visibility, remove bottlenecks and foster continuous improvement among engineering leaders and managers. Users of Typo can gain visibility into how developers are progressing overall as well as gauge satisfaction with their work; leaders can focus on essentials by taking a broad-brush view of team performances such as velocity, quality and throughput measures; by centralizing information regarding pull requests they can speed the review process while decreasing cycle times significantly.
Read More: Revolutionizing Business Management: A Brief Introduction to ERP Software in the Modern Age
Hatica
Hatica provides remote and on-site engineering teams with high visibility dashboards, insightful data visualization, and efficient processes that have helped other companies realize breakthrough results. With Hatica as their state-of-the-art analytics platform they enable engineering managers to increase efficiency, effectiveness, and team happiness across their engineering departments.
Hatica connects seamlessly to all your workplace apps to give a holistic overview of your team's processes, performance and outcomes. By encouraging team alignment and speeding delivery while increasing engagement Hatica helps engineering managers and collaborators produce greater outcomes while decreasing burnout risk.
Uplevel
With Uplevel, you can quantify how your engineering efforts impact the well-being of your team in a quantified fashion, using its actionable insights to motivate teams towards innovation and maximize productivity.
Uplevel's feature designed specifically to meet the needs of C-suite executives is Executive Insights: an intuitive dashboard created using Tableau business intelligence tools which showcases engineering team activities and development. With it comes visibility into key metrics including time spent by developers on focused work; meetings/Slack usage time and average project cycle times per engineering team - quickly revealing regional, role, or team specific trends in software engineering productivity quickly by hovering over data points.
Embold
Embold is an easy-to-use static code analyzer powered by AI that helps developers examine and improve their code quickly and easily. It offers unique value by inspecting code across four specific criteria - bugs in code itself, design issues, metrics metrics duplication.
Embold Score is calculated based on these four criteria and includes an algorithm which highlights risks, as well as organizing issues requiring attention in a prioritized list. It shows which parts of a system may have the most adverse impact and must therefore be addressed first; its support extends across 17 languages while easily working with version control systems, IDEs and build systems.
Propelo
The Propelo Engineering Management Excellence platform analyzes information gleaned from all your DevOps tools in order to provide insights that allow for faster software delivery, increased developer productivity and security improvements, as well as better engineering manager decisions with hard data rather than subjective interpretation alone.
Propelo was developed specifically to assist engineering teams reach new heights of performance by increasing transparency, unifying development, QA, DevOps, security and product management activities under one roof and streamlining collaboration among all roles involved. Integrating data from over 40 DevOps tools as well as offering a free trial gives Propelo the power to meet every organizational need imaginable.
LinearB
LinearB is a real-time productivity analysis tool and top Git tracking solution available today, that can keep an eye on overall team productivity while simultaneously pinpointing bottlenecks or any issues which arise within projects. Engineering managers may benefit greatly by being informed immediately if issues arise within teams' productivity metrics.
LinearB tracks how long developers spend doing different kinds of work. As such, it allows teams to evaluate individual team member activity rates as well as predict when projects may be complete. Furthermore, LinearB provides insights into engineering org metrics including DORA metrics that matter the most for an engineering organization so you have all of the data you need for board meetings or any other type of meeting with investors and boards of directors.
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Conclusion
Engineering management ERP software is essential in tracking and verifying your engineering org's performance, giving you confidence to enter board meetings knowing the data behind you is solid and correct. With it comes peace of mind knowing all is accurate.
By choosing an engineering management platform you will experience considerable energy and time savings. Not only does our tool collect and organize your data efficiently; it can help pinpoint bottlenecks for easier remediation as well as identify ways to eliminate inefficiency from processes altogether.