How can I quantify the value of my position without before and after metrics?

Question

First a little about what I do:

I'm a developer. I work in our company's Application Support department (Help Desk). My official title is "Application Support Engineer".

I do a lot of different stuff but mostly I create small tools, applications, and automated services that assist our team members in doing their jobs.

Some of my duties include:

• Write and maintain Atlassian Jira plugins and integrations
• Write and maintain Tableau integrations for automated reporting
• Create tools for Support Analysts that help them format data, interact with APIs, compare data-sets, view system metrics, etc.. (Tools that help them be more productive and efficient in their jobs )
• Create tools like browser extensions that help our Contact Center team members and managers submit issues to our Application Support Team

I have built and currently maintain many such tools which are used by 5-100 Team Members on a daily basis.

Now for my issue:

I am currently being considered for a significant pay increase. As part of the process I need to somehow quantify my value to the company, and that's where I hit a brick wall.

If you were to ask around, our Team Members, Managers, and Executives would unanimously agree that the tools that I have created have been an invaluable resource for our business. All would agree that the tools save us time, increase productivity, and improve accuracy across the board.

However, we don't really have any "before and after" type metrics that I can use to really quantify the value these tools bring to the table. I can't simply say "X job used to take 1 hour and now it takes 10 minutes so the tool increased productivity by 83%" and use that to calculate savings in operating costs.

So, in an environment without before and after metrics, how can I quantify the value of my work?

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Some other details.

• Ours is a fairly large international company
• I have been with the company for almost 7 years
• We have approximately 500 employees
• I work in our Corporate home office
• All of the managers, department heads, and executives in our company have worked with me directly at one point or another, save the CEO himself. (Read these people know who I am)
• I am a salaried employee
• I am required to work 40 hrs per week but I average about 60 hrs per week (by choice)
• I do clock in and out so there is a record of all my time
• The extra hours I spend working is NOT to complete my regular duties, I use that time to learn new programming languages, techniques, and industry tools as well as to work on side projects that we're not assigned to me but are my own ideas that are always welcome additions to our toolbox.
• The extra hours I work are all logged with a description of what I was doing during that time

Answer 1

1. Make an estimate as to many person-hours of labor each of the tools you designed this year have saved your team. If you spent 200 hours designing and maintaining these tools and the team saved 2000 hours, that's a 10:1 ROI.

2. Make an estimate as to how many person-hours of labor each of the tools you designed in previous years are saving the team this year. If you spent 20 hours on tools maintenance this year but these tools saved another 2000 hours, that's a 100:1 ROI.

3. Add a total of how many hours your tools saved the team versus how many hours you had to dedicate for design and maintenance this year. this should be 220 hours of design and maintenance versus 4000 hours of labor or an 18:1 ROI.

4. Point out that 4000 hours of person-hours save is twice your salary, which is predicated on 2000 hours yearly.

Conclude your analysis that you did more than just your job when you designed to automate, and your job is by no means over. State that the impact of you doing your job is that you are relieving any pressure to hire additional staff and that you are helping the company's hiring policies in the sense that the company can afford to be opportunistic and hire the best among the best instead of being forced to hire on the basis of need.

You want to look good as an individual contributor and part of the way you look good as an individual contributor is to point out the big picture impact of your activities to the company.

Answer 2

You're worth exactly what people are prepared to pay you. So you aim high. Your bosses already know and appreciate that you add a lot of value, so try and figure out what sort of budget they have and how much people in similar positions make.

I have asked for and gotten more than my manager made once, but I was doing very specialised stuff. It's a negotiation, get as much as you can. I normally try and work out what I'm worth on the current job market and then add 20%. It gives room to negotiate down if need be.