How to Evaluate Project Team Productivity
When it comes to evaluating your projects’ productivity and your team, it’s important to use the right tactics. When you use the proper methods to track performance, you have insightful measurements that you can use to improve your workers’ productivity. Whether you’re managing projects for a simple manufacturing company or a more complex service-based company, here are a few different ways you can get started right away to measure performance.
Time = success
Delivery of the products you create is the ultimate goal and main result of any project. Therefore, teams are interested in flexible metrics that help streamline the development and distribution process.
Track performance using different methods
For example, the software development phase is split into sprints into scrum teams. In other words, they plan to complete a certain amount of work in a certain period of time. You can use a program like Sprint Burndown that documents the time and amount of work in progress.
Assess tasks
Try to find out more often what tasks your team is working on and compare their effectiveness. You can do this with resource management or time attendance tools. Once you have gathered enough data, you can compare the entire team’s effectiveness and conclude that although John, for example, writes code for 8 hours, while Bethany does it for only 6 hours.
Get feedback from the team
Ask your team, “How productive do you think you are?” And after the answers received: “How do you know?”
This will help you determine how they measure their productivity. For example, by the number of emails sent or by the results of your projects? Or maybe they have a special measurement formula?
Using process audit data, task ratings, and team feedback, you can measure the amount of time each process takes.
Minimize process to improve productivity
Once you complete the process analysis, you can assess how correct these processes are. Take a look at:
- Duplicate efforts between teams
- Unnecessary process steps
- Collecting or entering data
- Chart your processes using a network diagram or any other visual aids.
In other words, it will be easier for you to identify and discard process steps that add no value or require unnecessary effort. Evaluate all the data collected in the process and make sure that they are all necessary and equally important. If you don’t need them, stop recording them, and save time.
You can also check the reports generated by your team to make sure they are correct and required. Team leaders change over time, and their data needs change, but they don’t always forget to tell you to stop providing reports that they no longer need. This can lead to huge overheads that are irrelevant to the business.
Track Productivity with Project Management Software
The best productivity tool is, of course, time tracking. By using various time tracking software, you can see where they are spending their efforts.
The software can also tell you which of your employees is the most effective. Alternatively, you can also chat with those who are not doing well and ask the rest of the team to share best practices.
Measure productivity by the number of tasks completed
This is another cool way to track your productivity instead of measuring a specific amount of time spent on tasks and projects. Instead of looking at the time a team spends on projects or any other work tasks, pay special attention to which tasks and how many are completed to measure performance.
To use this method correctly, you will need to break down each project into smaller tasks and assign those tasks to individual workers. Then, make sure each person has their own personal KPIs and goals for how many of those tasks they should complete over a period of time.
Have daily meetings
This method works when you are less fixated on numbers and more focused on keeping your team and projects running smoothly. Conduct a daily control meeting in person, via conference calls, or even chat in an application like Slack.
During the meeting, ask each team to briefly share what they have recently completed and are still working on.
Wrapping Up
If your company is missing some of the above points, it can be quite difficult for you to implement any measures to track the entire team’s performance. As a leader, you should lead by example and try to be as productive as possible.
Of course, productivity is hard to grasp, but take some time to think about it, and soon you will find ways to choose what makes your workplace more productive and what doesn’t.
If you still need help, our company is always happy to lend a helping hand and provide you with advice. Contact us now, and our specialists will answer you ASAP.