- In practice, productivity measurement is not straightforward
- How would you measure the productivity of a hospital, fund manager, police force, government ministry, 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 – and most organisations offer more than one product or service and each one may require a very different mix of resources
- But, at process or task level, there are many partial productivity measures possible
- Some focus on just one output from just one input to a whole process or task – for example:
Mortgages approved in a week or Tins produced in a shift
Staff employed in a branch Canning line
- They measure what’s got out of the input resource paid for and whether the trends are in the right direction or not
- Partial measures 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 – ones which focus his team members on their most important outputs and most costly inputs
- 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
- However, most of them would be irrelevant to most managers – hence the need to focus only on the important outputs and inputs for each team
- The few ratios that managers need will cover some 90% of their teams’ productivity picture
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