You would notice that the IT and security teams brought in zero revenue and fire them all.

I wonder if it would be more economically efficient for security teams to turn into insurance companies. So companies selling books over the internet would fire their security teams and instead buy a insurance policy against any intrusions, have the security company scour their systems for vulnerabilities during underwriting, and then pay a monthly fee and upkeep while the security company is held liable for any security intrusions.

The book company could then buy a standard product as a simple cost, while the security company attaches direct revenue to effective security.

I guess the IT/security company would need to run your infrastructure to be able to set up monitoring and such?

Ha! In fact all you would need is a sales team!

Then next quarter you fire them too!

It's difficult to judge teams based on revenue. A software company makes $100million. Is it the developers? the sales team, the marketing team or QA team that get's the credit? do you split it evenly? do you split it by the number of hours worked? If you have a company, there is really only one team, all of the company, all the other teams are usually sub teams that are interdependent on each other.

> What if you judge a team based on the revenue it brought in vs the cost of the employees in the team?

That can still be hard to accurately measure. You can measure, of course, how much revenue was attributed to sales of the product developed by the team, but how much of that is attributable to the team's work and how much is attributable to company-wide marketing and how much is due to company image developed by public experience with products developed by other teams is...not always readily obvious. (And, of course, then you have teams that aren't devoted to particular products or which provide company-wide services supporting product teams, but not directly generating revenue -- unless, of course, you organize your company so that accounting, HR, marketing, etc., are all broken up and product-team specific.)

Of course, if you measure by the entire company a lot of that uncertainty gets washed out.

So how do you judge the revenue brought in by internal facing teams? IT teams? QA? Basically, anything that isn't a revenue center, or is a cost center?

Some projects aren't directly profitable, but are important and must be done. Infosec for example. Using this metric, important jobs may not get done.

That won't work for all jobs - I work in the actuarial department for a (very) large insurance company. We can't directly affect profit. You could argue for whether or not our projections are correct, but they can be affected by many things out of our control.

I'm guessing that's true for a lot of areas in a large company. What about the department that takes care of buildings or HR for example?