You should of course have someone in management agree to your numbers and approve that you can use it on your CV.
I learned this once by creating a tool at a telecommunications company I was working at. It made it significantly faster for Technical Support to initiate a Remote Desktop session with a customer. We ran reports on how many RDP sessions we started per month; and recorded how much time the tool saved. At the time it was estimated to save about $2.1M in time savings every year, at a time when the Tech Support queues had long waits.
Couldn’t get any traction with management. Had some grassroots growth internally until we were asked to shut it down since it was an unofficial tool.
Meanwhile they would chase sales campaigns or marketing stunts that might result in $50-100k in new sign ups.
Nobody cares how much you saved in time because it doesn’t get reported anywhere. It shows up on no important metrics. Sales going up by $100K is sexy. Admins handling an extra ticket per day because the interface is quicker isn’t.
I don’t get that. Solving an extra ticket per day should somehow correlate with either revenue increase(indirect) or cost saving(direct), right?
Managers want big teams. It makes them look good. Having 15 direct reports looks better than having 10. That means the manager needs his people to be efficient enough to look good on paper, but inefficient enough that he gets to hire more people. Having a bigger budget and higher headcount makes him look good.
Just talking in terms of business impact puts you miles ahead of other candidates in many eng jobs. Especially for levels above junior. Very important to have engineers who (want to) understand why they do what they do.
you are agreeing with me