Productivity relates to how much quality work the team can do over a particular period. You need to define what that looks like for you. That could be productivity relative to other teams in your organization (“The Sales team can do this in 6 days, so why does it take us 12?”).
There is no single set of measures that universally applies to all companies. The appropriate set of measures depends on the organization’s strategy, technology, and the particular industry and environment in which they compete.
Few metrics used for productivity which may be financial or customer satisfaction or project management, are as:
Return on Investment – (Net Benefits/Costs) x 100 – The most appropriate formula for evaluating project investment (and project management investment) is Net Benefits divided by Cost. By multiplying this result by 100, this calculation determines the percentage return for every dollar you’ve invested.
Productivity – Productivity is output produced per unit of input. Productivity measures tell you whether you’re getting
Few tools for productivity are listed below.
Dashboards
The dashboard might be the most important tool in your project management toolkit. From this one screen, you have a bird’s eye view of every aspect of the project, rendered in easy-to-read graphs and charts. When this tool is part of an online PM software, then you’re getting that data in real-time, which allows you the time to make the right decisions based on the most accurate information.
CPM/PERT Chart
A program evaluation review technique (PERT) chart incorporates some important data. For each step in the process, you’re able to create relationships with succeeding steps. They can be start-to-start or finish-to-finish. You can create lags and other kinds of relationships between different activities. You can roll all these out and begin to calculate what’s called three critical paths. This allows you to do additional project risk analysis and understand slack time analysis.
CPM or “Critical Path Method” – It is a tool to analyze project and determine duration, based on identification of “critical path” through an activity network. The knowledge of the critical path can permit project managers to change duration. It is a project modeling technique developed in the 1950s and is used with all forms of projects. It displays activities as nodes or circles with known activity times.
A critical path method (CPM) chart is like a network diagram. Basically, all of the steps in the project are connected. You can go through the connected steps to determine which path dictates the longest amount of time to get through the entire end-to-end process.
PERT Chart – A PERT chart (program evaluation review technique) is a form of diagram for CPM that shows activity on an arrow diagram. PERT charts are more simplistic than CPM charts because they simply show the timing of each step of the project and the sequence of the activities. In PERT, estimates are uncertain and ranges of duration and the probability that activity duration will fall into that range is taken whereas CPM is deterministic.
Developing PERT Chart
- Identify all tasks or project components
- Identify the first task that must be completed
- Identify the next task that must be completed
- Continue this process until all component tasks are sequenced.
- Identify task durations
- Construct the PERT chart
- Determine critical path
PERT is a method for analysing the tasks involved in completing a given project, especially the time needed to complete each task and identifying the minimum time required to complete the total project.
Gantt Chart
A Gantt chart is a popular project management bar chart that tracks tasks across time. When first developed in 1917, the Gantt chart did not show the relationships between the tasks. Since then, it has become common to track both time and interdependencies between tasks, which is now its everyday use.
Since their first introduction, Gantt charts have become an industry standard. They are an important project management tool used for showing the phases, tasks, milestones and resources needed as part of a project.
Score Cards
When it comes to performance of the project team, a scorecard is the way of tracking it. Every project manager is responsible of accessing the performance of the team members and reporting it to the upper management and HR.
This information is then used for promotion purposes as well as human resource development. A comprehensive score card and performance assessment can place the team member in the correct position.
Check Sheets
They consist of lists of items and are indicator of how often each item on the list occurs. It is also called as confirmation check sheets. They are used for data collection process easier by pre-written descriptions of events likely to occur like ‘‘Have all inspections been performed?’’ ‘‘How often does a particular problem occur?’’ ‘‘Are problems more common with part X than with part Y?’’
It is a simple tool for process improvement and problem solving. It can also highlight items of importance during data collection. They are an effective tool for quality improvement when used with histograms and Pareto analysis. It is not a check list which is used to ensure that all important steps or actions have been taken but check sheet is a tally sheet to collect data on frequency of occurrence of defects or errors.
A check sheet is also knows as a tally sheet. It’s a data collection form that is set up to allow subject matter experts to assist in capturing data about processes. Check sheets are used to capture data quickly and easily with everybody’s help in the process.
It is of two types
- Location or concentration diagram – In it the marking is done on a diagram like before submitting car to service center, a car diagram is used to list defects at present by marking and writing on the diagram.
- Basic check sheet – Lists the different defects and the number of times each instance occurs.
- Traveler check sheets – These are a powerful method when attached to a particular order or going through the system step in the process to capture how many defects are found.
- Location check sheet – An image is drawn up of the whole process and then used to identify the problems in the process.
- Confirmation check sheet – This is a real simple method to understand what the steps are that should be done properly in the sequence.
- Graphical or Distribution check sheet – It is commonly used for collecting frequency by marking to visualize the distribution of the data as shown in diagram below
Benchmarking
Benchmarks are measures (of quality, time, or cost) that have already been achieved by others. It indicates about the level of possible goal so as to set goals for own operations. It is helpful for listing new ideas into the process though borrowed from others.
Usually the benchmarking data is sourced from surveys or interviews with industry experts, trade or professional organizations, published articles, company tours, prior experience of current staff or conversations.
Types of Benchmarks
- Internal/Company – It establishes a baseline for external benchmarking Identifies differences within the company and provides rapid and easy-to-adapt improvements though opportunities for improvement are limited to the company’s practices.
- Direct Competition – It prioritizes areas of improvement according to competition and is of interest to most companies but often involves a limited pool of participants thus, opportunities for improvement are limited to “known” competitive practices and may lead to potential antitrust issues.
- Industry – It provides industry trend information and is a conventional basis for quantitative and process-based comparison though opportunities for improvement may be limited by industry paradigms
- Best-in-Class – It examines multiple industries to provide the best opportunity for identifying radically innovative practices and processes by building a brand new perspective but, usually difficult to identify best-in-class companies and get them to participate.
