Measuring productivity
All notes
Everything here, grouped by subject.
Core notes remain method-focused; separate guides compare named products. No unverified productivity-improvement figures. This collection argues for careful measurement, not against measurement.
- Request
- Waiting for approval
- Work
- Waiting for the specialist
- Review
- Waiting for the weekly run
- Delivered
Measured end to end, most of the elapsed time in a typical process is queueing rather than working. Productivity measures see none of it.
0108sections
What productivity means
Output divided by input. Everything difficult follows from both numbers being harder to establish than they look.
0208sections
Choosing measures
One measure can be optimised. Two that oppose each other require genuine improvement.
0308sections
Where figures go wrong
When a measure becomes a target it stops describing the work. Treat that as a prediction, not a caution.
0408sections
Work without a unit
The part that determines the outcome frequently involves no visible action at all.
0508sections
The system around the work
A process moves at the speed of its slowest step. Effort spent elsewhere produces inventory, not output.
0608sections
Doing it
A target set without knowing current performance is a guess, and nobody can tell which kind until it is too late.
0708sections
The people measured
Measurement that is explained stays accurate. Measurement that is not gets managed instead.
0808sections
The short version
Most productivity problems are not about people
They are queues, handoffs, approvals, old equipment and fragmented weeks. A per-person measure hides all of them and a per-item measure shows them, from data most organisations already hold.