Productivity measures

How would you measure the productivity of a hospital, fund manager, police force, government department, bank or PR firm?
At organisational level, there’s no one meaningful total productivity measure available because of the complicated mix of processes and tasks, or outputs and inputs involved
Most organisations also offer more than one product or service – and each one may employ a very different mix of resources and methods for using them
However, at process or task level, there are many partial productivity measures possible and useful
Some focus on just one output from just one input to a whole process or task – for example:

They measure what’s got out of an input resource already paid for and highlight whether trends are moving in the right direction or not
They also let you compare actual with past performance levels in-house or best practices outside – and they raise alarms if and when things start to go wrong
Each individual manager should have at least one partial productivity measure which focuses his team on their most important outputs and costly inputs
However, there’s thousands of partial productivity ratios are possible
Perm any one output with any one input in any organisation and one can soon see the blizzards of ratios possible
Most of them would be irrelevant to most managers
Hence the need to focus only on important outputs and inputs for each team
Overall, the few should cover some 90% of their teams’ productivity picture