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 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.
Better still, those graphs and charts can be shared with a simple keystroke. When you want to share data with your stakeholders, sponsors or team members, there’s no wasted time creating colorful and clear presentations, the dashboard tool does it for you. But each audience requires a different focus. Stakeholders and sponsors don’t require the depth of detail your team will need, which is why the dashboard allows you to filter your reports to get just the data you want.
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 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.
CPM is a diagram showing every step of the project, as letters with lines to each letter representing the sequence in which the project steps take place. A list of activities is required to complete the project and the time (duration) that each activity will take to complete, along with the sequence and dependencies between activities. CPM lays out the longest path of planned activities to the end of the project as well as the earliest and latest that each activity can start and finish without delaying other steps in the project. The project manager can then, determine which activities in the project need to be completed before others and how long those activities can take before they delay other parts of the project. They also get to know which set of activities is likely to take the longest, also called as the critical path which is also the shortest possible time period in which the project can be completed.
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.
A PERT chart is a graphic representation of a project’s schedule, showing the sequence of tasks, which tasks can be performed simultaneously, and the critical path of tasks that must be completed on time in order for the project to meet its completion deadline. The chart can be constructed with a variety of attributes, such as earliest and latest start dates for each task, earliest and latest finish dates for each task, and slack time between tasks. A PERT chart can document an entire project or a key phase of a project. The chart allows a team to avoid unrealistic timetables and schedule expectations, to help identify and shorten tasks that are bottlenecks, and to focus attention on most critical tasks. It is most useful for planning and tracking entire projects or for scheduling and tracking the implementation phase of a planning or improvement effort.
Developing PERT Chart
- Identify all tasks or project components – Ensure the team has knowledge of the project so that during the brainstorming session all component tasks needed to complete the project are captured.
- Identify the first task that must be completed – Place the appropriate card at the extreme left of the working surface.
- Identify any other tasks that can be started simultaneously with task #1 – Align these tasks either above or below task #1 on the working surface.
- Identify the next task that must be completed
- Identify any other tasks that can be started simultaneously with task #2 – Align these tasks either above or below task #2 on the working surface.
- 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. These charts are typically used to look for things like defects found in a manufacturing organization or the frequency of a particular problem that occurs in a process. There is no experience, and very little training needed for the involved parties to be able to use a check sheet in order to gather the data. It is an effective technique for getting a simple analysis quickly about faults in processes and assisting in gather the data needed for creating a Pareto chart.
It is of two types
- Location or concentration diagram
- Basic check sheet
- Traveler check sheets
- Location check sheet
- Confirmation check sheet
- Graphical or Distribution check sheet
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 then get them to participate.
