Mmm, reports! Graphs, tables and other Excel goodness. Carefully collected, severely scrutinized, and often obsolete by the time it lands on your managers desk. But what if there was another way?

In military terminology, a Common Operational Picture is a single identical display of relevant (operational) information shared by more than one Command. A COP enables both the lowest soldier and highest commander to independently and immediately sense and act in a collaborative fashion to achieve the predefined mission and commander's intent.

Systematic has tried to use the same approach to metrics and reporting: Collecting quality data from many different sources and combining into one single quality cockpit – containing an aggregated view of the situation for senior management and detailed views for projects and teams. The quality cockpit gathers data automatically, presents the current situation and provides direct links to dig into the underlying data. Over the past few years of implementing the cockpit and the routines surrounding it, it’s gone from being a pilot project to an integrated part of their daily work, supported by development teams and senior management alike.

In this talk, Jørgen Lund will go through the merits of having a common source of truth for the project status and how that helps to create ownership in the projects and teams and enables the teams to react on the fly when issues pop up. He will talk about their process for selecting quality metrics and defining goals that allow projects to stay in flow, without letting the issues pile up. Finally, he'll give some examples of the metrics they use with some visual examples of their quality cockpit.