How to monitor team members activity and effectiveness?

Question

I would like to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of my team members. I'd like the measurement to be relatively objective and transparent, and I believe that some form of software would fulfill those objectives.

How could I search for and evaluate such software? What kinds of software incorporate these kinds of features (While software recommendations are out of scope because they change frequently, the underlying requirements should be more stable.)

Is there software that might: - Diagram activity over the past year - Facilitate peer evaluation? - Measure improvement?

Are there non-software procedures that would assist?

Answer 1

Your question is very generic - actually too generic to be able to give a concrete answer. It depends on what kind of project you manage and how you can measure effectiveness and efficiency of team members.

IS/IT - Application Development Project

If you manage an Application Development project, you probably use an Agile Software Development model like Scrum and thereby use the different artifacts (documentation) on different levels.

The Scrum teams can break down backlog items in their Sprint Planning to actual tasks and can document them in for example Jira (and connect with Confluence) and thereby have some sort of follow up. (I am not an expert of Jira though, so I can't actually give you more than that.)

Another thing to consider in Application Development projects is the amount of Technical Debt, i.e. the cost of bad code, meaning bad design or just bad code convention. Even if the code compiles and run, you can end up with bugs and especially later on, when adding features you might be forced to spend a lot of time refactoring your code. A great tool for measuring Technical Debt is SonarSource and supports a number of languages today.

Product projects (e.g. Automotive industry)

If you are in the Automotive industry and manage a vehicle project, you probably manage it in a waterfall model and use different kinds of documentation for different purposes. Common to have Requirement tools, Project Management tools for planning on different levels and Project Time logging tool where coworkers are logging their time to the different projects they are involved in.

If I remember correct, I think the company I used to work for used MS Project with specific templates for the project planning, a SAP Module for Time logging and then we had some plugin which visualized the resources over time, either by department or project and could also be used to foresee any resource complications. In other words, both following up on actual spent time as well as projected in order to avoid problems ahead.

Remember, that is only time. How do you measure quality?

With that said...

...it depends on

• what type of projects you are managing?
  • what type of Project Model you are using? (Agile/Scrum, Waterfall...)
• what type of tools you use today
  • for project planning on different levels (phases, tasks...)?
  • for time logging, and which level (project, phases, tasks)?
• What is most important of QDCF? (Quality, Delivery, Cost, Feature)
  • How do you measure Quality?
  • How do you measure Delivery?
  • How do you measure Cost?
  • How do you measure Feature? (Scope - value added for customers)
• what type of efficiency you want to measure?
  • Time efficiency only? (Project Plan vs Actual time spent)
  • Index of Time vs. Quality?
  • Time & Cost vs. Quality & Features or some other algorithm index you have for QDCF?

NOTE! - As you can see, project planning and time logging have to be matched "level wise", i.e. if you want to have detailed information in your efficiency reports, you need to have your coworkers log their time on a level that corresponds to same level from project planning.

So, there are a lot of questions you need to answer and define whithin your company, before you can actually decide what kind of measurement you want, and then choose/design a tool for measuring what you want. Don't forget about Quality, and the rest of QDCF.

Answer 2

Depending on the methodology used (SCRUM, V model or traditional waterfall) AND depending on the type of engagement(projects with a clear start and a clear end or on-going Service) your metrics and key performance indicator (KPIs) will be different.

Regarding software, however I can tell you that the vast majority of engagements is in practice managed using spreadsheet (like MS excel).

Service Management

In this case ITIL is often considered a reference framework. The main indicator are defined in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Operation Level Agreement (OLAs).

Usually Service engagement will rely on workflow management or in IT issue management tools (like Jira or others).

Project Management

Often in non agile IT projects Earned Value is used to provide indication about the progress. Scrum methodology comes with its own set of metrics usually mixed with custom indicator relevant to the engagement.

In term of software, Source code repositories (like TFS or others) provide very relevant data but dedicated project planning tools (like MS project or others) are often used.

In all cases

You will need to identify the stakeholders of your engagement. Take the time to discuss with them what is important for them to monitor and define custom indicators as needed.