To be successful in a Corporate IT environment, we need to measure speed in terms of the time it takes for the business to realize the expected business value and not in terms of the project start and completion dates.

By exclusively rewarding IT teams for getting projects done “on time and on budget”, it fails to encourage the one thing business leaders most want from their Corporate IT teams: speed to deliver business value. It’s not simply about getting an application into a user’s hands quickly; it’s about asking yourself, “Have I fulfilled their needs quickly?” This question still accounts for original measurement of speed.

Corporate IT can improve its speed to value by breaking up the deliverables into smaller pieces and then organizing those deliverables so end users get usable features before the end of the project. This is the most basic premise of iterative or agile development. This also holds true for business-led projects, but organizations with poor visibility into how their employees use technology will find this challenging.

So, gather your project team together and discover the soonest date you can deliver value to end users. Write that down. That is where your value measurement begins. Then, release the project deliverables in stages until full project functionality is realized and the project is considered complete. Continue measuring during the post-delivery period until end user satisfaction is achieved. This technique measures how well Corporate IT is supporting their end users by measuring the rate at which a project or initiative is adopted.

For extra credit, allow your team to be open to end user feedback along the way and to pivot on the remaining portion of the project, based on their learnings.

In the end, Corporate IT can deliver solutions at warp speed, but if employees aren’t adopting them, there can’t be any sense of IT creating value. Only then, can Corporate IT truly measure success on behalf of the enterprise.