Manage Your Project Portfolio, 2nd Edition

Don’t Even Try to Measure Individual Productivity

Since I’ve been working in the field, my managers and clients have been trying to measure productivity. What a waste. Individual productivity means nothing.

What does mean something is a team’s throughput. That’s right—a team. A team produces a set of running, tested features—or not. When a team produces a document, that team might be getting ready to be productive, but they haven’t produced anything you can count—unless that document is required as part of the deliverable. Only when a team produces a working demo or prototype—or, even better, a working product—can you see what their productivity is.

If you try to measure individual productivity, you will get some data. And the people you ...