4 Metrics to Measure Your Team’s Productivity

This article comes from Entrepreneur.

4 Metrics to Measure Your Team’s Productivity

Here are four numbers to track so you can ensure your team performs productively.

1. Planned-to-done ratios.

Projects stay uncompleted for any number of reasons. Maybe you changed your branding tactic, or your company pivoted to start working on a product that better suits your customer needs.

Even if your change of plans was helpful for advancing your business, it is beneficial to understand how well your team executed plans you made previously.

The planned-to-done ratio measures what percentage of the tasks you set out for your team were completed satisfactorily.

Analyzing how well your team was able to complete a given list of tasks gives you deep insights into your team’s capacity and potential for productivity.

2. Cycle time.

While agile strategies were created with software development teams in mind, you can use agile metrics in almost any business.

Cycle time is based on doing work in “iterative sprints” that cut projects down to a two-week maximum.

This system forces you to break down tasks into bite-sized segments so you can optimize productivity. The shorter your cycle time, the more quickly you can get work done.

3. Attendance.

This number does not have to be like a school roll call. However, when you are working in small, collaborative teams, the presence of team members can make a significant difference in the success of the final product.

Even if you are working remotely, it is easy to tell when a team member is not fully committed to the project. Pay attention to missed meetings, sick days, and the number of times people arrive late to work. These factors may be signs of burnout, health issues or other problems.

4. Escaped defects.

This measure comes from software development teams that want to see how many bugs they missed in a new product. However, it can easily apply to other organizations if defects are taken as mistakes that affect the customer.

For example, if you are a marketing team, a defect could be a failed Facebook campaign or a customer complaint. While these situations might arise less frequently than software bugs, a measure of mistakes over time allows you to analyze how accurately your team is meeting customer needs.

If they are sacrificing quality to meet deadlines, perhaps you need to reallocate talent during your planning process.

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