If you've adopted DORA metrics as your standard for measuring DevOps performance, stop us if this hypothetical scenario doesn't sound familiar. You check your DORA dashboard during a lunch break, full of optimism that you’ll get a clear picture of your team’s performance. Instead, you leave with nothing but a sandwich in your stomach and the nagging feeling that you’re focusing too much on the results of the game instead of the people that are playing it.
The challenge, of course, is that DORA metrics are lagging indicators. A dip in Deployment Frequency or a spike in MTTR tells us we have a problem, but it doesn't tell us why. The real work—the work that leads to elite performance—is in systematically improving the leading indicators that predict DORA success.
From lagging results to leading indicators
The concept of “operational readiness” can feel like a vague, abstract goal. We all nod our heads in meetings when the topic comes up, but what does it actually mean?
Our take is that operational readiness boils down to three key things:
Who owns this? You should know the answer in seconds, not minutes, when an incident hits.
What’s broken? Engineering leaders need the right monitors in place so they’re not flying blind.
How do I fix it? All engineers should be empowered with clear runbooks and automated workflows, not just the one person who built the service.
These are the real levers you can pull to actually improve your DORA metrics, moving from passive tracking to active improvement. The key is having a single tool that can measure both your day-to-day practices and the high-level outcomes they create.
Introducing the DORA Operational Readiness Scorecard
To bridge the gap between tracking lagging metrics and improving leading indicators, we built the DORA Operational Readiness Scorecard.
This new Scorecard is structured across four maturity levels that guide you from foundational checks to elite operational practices. These levels build on each other to create a clear path to production readiness. Each level contains specific rules that measure both the leading indicators of performance and the lagging DORA metrics themselves, allowing you to see exactly how daily practices correlate to your outcomes. For example:
Minimum: The first level ensures you have the absolute fundamentals in place, with rules that confirm ownership is set and documentation is in place.
Established: This level begins to track DORA metrics, checking for a deployment frequency of at least twice a month and an MTTR of less than 12 hours, and encourages improving on fundamentals by setting up monitoring.
Accelerating: This level raises the bar, checking for more advanced practices like embedded metrics dashboards and a pipeline success rate of at least 85%.
Elite: The highest level tracks the sophisticated practices that define elite DORA performance, such as defined SLOs and an MTTR of less than 60 minutes.
This allows you to see the direct correlation between your operational readiness and your DORA performance, turning your Scorecard from a simple report into an actionable tool for improvement.
Start operationalizing DORA today
Connecting insights to action is the key to breaking the cycle of passive metric tracking. For a deep dive into this new approach, enroll in our new Cortex Academy course: Operationalizing DORA Metrics.
You'll get step-by-step guidance on implementing these new practices, including how to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators, how to use Scorecards to measure the leading indicators you can actually control, and how to use Initiatives to drive meaningful change across the organization.
And if you're heading to IDPCON in NYC on October 9th, we're hosting a hands-on Engineering Intelligence workshop where you can put these concepts into practice. We’ll explore how Cortex makes it easy to connect high-level metrics like cycle time and incident rate directly to the services, teams, and workflows you already manage in your IDP. Register with promo code "DORA" for a free ticket!
If you're ready to move beyond passively tracking DORA and start actively improving the capabilities that lead to elite performance, schedule a demo.
