The major challenge for managers in 21st century is that of improving productivity of knowledge workers. The management in CDC Bangalore have also started working on this as they had an open feedback session recently.
Here is my proposal to improve productivity – I call it “Productivity Management Framework” or PMF in short. I am on a roll creating official sounding terms and acronyms 🙂 . Anyway,this framework can be divided into three parts – Measurement, Target,Reward
Measurement
Clearly, we need a way to measure productivity if we need to know if productivity is improving or not. I propose a new point system called “Value points“.
Managers of an agile team( DEV,QA and Doc) decide together how much a user story is worth to a customer and then assign a value point to it. This point has no relation to the effort required to complete a US. That is a US that is marked large could have 5 value points while a user story marked small could be worth 25 value points.
The criteria for setting points would be –
1) How important is the US for the customer? Does it help customers achieve something? Most features come under this and get high number of value points
2) If it is a bug resulting from a feature previously implemented by the team, then it does not have any value points assigned to it.This helps in ensuring that the quality of the feature implemented is also considered when the above system is used.
At the end of the year, we could just add up all the points a team achieves and that would be their productivity.
Target
Currently with velocity, the team itself decides on the size of the userstory and hence any target associated with the velocity will not work. The solution is to have the above Value point targets for each team. There should be a target setting meeting with all managers and entire agile team present where this point target is set. This would be similar to how sales team get their sales target set at the beginning of the year.
Managers would also need to have a target. I propose that managers also have a value point target, but this target should not be a blind addition of all the points their teams achieve. The value point target for the managers should be at feature level. So, feature 1 is 25 points, feature 2 is 10 points and feature 3 is 10 points. This might correspond to 300 value points to the agile team but only 45 points for the manager. This would prevent the manager from giving more points to each user story just to meet his/her own target.
Reward
This is the most important part of the framework. Any productivity improvement initiative should have a buy-in from all employees. One way of doing this would be to have substantial bonuses to people who have achieved the target. If it were up to me, I would set up the reward system as follows –
Team – Every team would have a substantial amount set as bonus. If team achieves the target points, it gets the full amount else a partial or no bonus can be given depending on the company’s financial situation. Also, the bonus amount is same irrespective of number of people in the team. This encourages people to work harder to achieve the target with less number of people rather than hiring more people.
It also encourages team members to help each other out to meet the target.
Possible issues
•Cumbersome process to assign points to all the user stories. Tracking them would be even bigger task as there is no inbuilt field in rally( the software we use to track). Tracking it in a separate tool would mean proper integration between rally and the new tool
•Issue resolution – The team might not agree with the value points associated to a US by the managers. This would lead to a very sticky situation.
•Meetings – People might complain about having too many meetings.
•Teams might change during course of a year. Managers can change during the course of a year. Need to think of ways to handle these situations.
The weakest point in the above framework is the measurement part. The value points assigned are very subjective and we cannot compare one set of value points( assigned by one set of dev/qa/doc manager) with another set of value points assigned by a different set of managers.
I am sure there are a lot of loopholes in this framework. What do you think are the major concerns in implementing this framework?
Management Concepts & Book Summaries 