You’ve surely experienced it before: your electricity bill arrives, and it’s higher than usual. Thinking back over the past month, nothing seems to have changed—same routines, same appliances… But what if it’s not just about how much energy you use, but how you use it? That’s when you start thinking again… Could you be using power during more expensive hours? Are your old appliances becoming inefficient and using more energy to do the same job?
The same thing can happen in your software development projects: you seem to be doing everything the same way (same investment, same resources, same time…), yet your “IT bill” keeps rising. And maybe the issue here too is how things are being done.
So, could it be a matter of better understanding how resources are being used? That’s where the critical relationship between productivity and quality in IT comes into play.
Power Without Control Is Useless
Or, in our context, productivity without quality is also meaningless. Yes, the tech sector is so competitive that everyone is racing to launch products and services as fast as possible—but that very speed, if mismanaged, can backfire.
Delivering a product quickly that fails to meet expectations or has flaws is worse than delivering it late. Here’s our first key takeaway: productivity without quality is not sustainable. But does that mean we have to sacrifice speed to ensure quality?
Not necessarily. What we need is a smarter approach—one that enables us to measure in order to understand and continuously improve how digital products are being developed.
This is where objective software product metrics become crucial. One of the most widely used is Function Points, an international standard that measures the functional size of software regardless of the technology, programming language, or development team.
Why Is This So Important?
Because only with transparent and comparable metrics can we:
- Objectively evaluate what’s being delivered
- Compare productivity across teams, vendors, or time periods
- Estimate future developments more accurately
- Make decisions based on real data, not on perceptions
This way, we shift from a reactive approach (problems are discovered too late) to a proactive one (deviations can be anticipated and corrected in time). But we’ll come back to that in a moment.
Anatomy of Your IT Bill
To ground these ideas, let’s revisit the electricity bill analogy in an IT context. Your “IT bill” is made up of three main variables:
- Quantity (Consumption): The more functionality you request, the more development effort is required. Your bill goes up.
- Rate: This is the cost per development hour. If your team or vendor charges a high rate, you’ll pay more for every hour invested.
- Efficiency (Productivity): This is the ability to do more with less. Like a low-energy appliance, an efficient team delivers more value with the same effort.
So what would you say is the key to optimizing this bill? If reducing the quantity of product isn’t an option, and lowering rates isn’t always possible either, then EFFICIENCY is the answer: producing more with fewer resources, and with quality. And to achieve that, you need data, standardized processes, and tools that give you real visibility.
Measuring Is the First Step Toward Improvement
What isn’t measured can’t be improved. But it’s not enough to measure—you have to measure correctly. That means standardizing the process. All stakeholders (internal teams, vendors, PMOs, etc.) must work within a common framework, with clear rules for defining, estimating, and evaluating the software being developed.
This allows you to build solid indicators such as:
- Cost per unit of product
- Defects per delivered functionality
- Efficiency by team
- Deviation from estimates…
And with these metrics, you can feed dashboards that not only reflect the past but also project the future. A future that, with the rise of artificial intelligence, looks promising—yet its adoption comes with significant investment. That’s why measuring the real impact of AI in terms of productivity and quality is essential.
We require well-designed productivity and quality dashboards. Only then can they cease to be just technical tools and become strategic management instruments, capable of guiding high-level decisions based on objective evidence.
Balancing IT Productivity and Quality: the real advantage
Gone are the days of running IT by making impossible trade-offs: deliver fast or deliver well. Today, the true competitive edge belongs to those who can do both at the same time.
And there are no shortcuts or tricks to get there—it requires implementing processes that enable teams to deliver with clarity and quality in every release. Increasing efficiency without compromising quality is the key to reducing your IT bill without losing your capacity to innovate.
It’s about smart investment and understanding that in software development, the balance between productivity and quality is a discipline. And like any discipline, it can be learned and applied—something we’ve been doing at LedaMC for over 20 years through the Productivity and Quality Offices we’ve implemented for our clients.
Want to learn it? Get in touch with us!
