> In other words, in the absence of RoI measures, the percent of engineering time spent on value-add activities is a pretty good proxy for productivity.
What about using self-rated satisfaction of your workers in terms of how happy they are with their engineering solutions? I find that when I solve a really nice problem and add something that is cool, or fix a very annoying bug, I feel very satisfied with the result. Whereas, I have produced things in the past (when I worked as a programmer) that seemed to make management happy that I wasn't satisfied with, and it seemed to me at least that the results weren't as useful in the end.
This is way too subjective; I've met way too many developers throughout my career who loved to spend their time crafting "perfect" code rather than deliver customer-facing value for this to work as a measure that aligns with business objectives.
What about using self-rated satisfaction of your workers in terms of how happy they are with their engineering solutions? I find that when I solve a really nice problem and add something that is cool, or fix a very annoying bug, I feel very satisfied with the result. Whereas, I have produced things in the past (when I worked as a programmer) that seemed to make management happy that I wasn't satisfied with, and it seemed to me at least that the results weren't as useful in the end.