How to Identify Team Productivity Issues in 3 Steps

How to Optimize Your Key Productivity Metrics

Let’s go back to the basics. The ultimate goal we all have is to improve time to market by reducing our cycle time.

And here is a little-known fact every head of engineering should be aware of:

The average age of WIP and cycle time are essentially the exact same thing, only cycle time is measured against completed tasks, whereas the age of a task is a measure concerning tasks that are still in progress.

What’s the Real Deal with Managing WIP Average Age?

So what does it actually mean to manage the average age of WIP?

It means that the ticket with the highest WIP age is your priority.

It means that your team commits to moving this work item through the process quickly. If it gets stuck, they investigate the cause. If it’s assigned to someone who’s unavailable or has a third-party dependency, they step in to address the issue (or escalate it if they can’t control it!).

3 Steps to Revealing Team Productivity Issues

Now that we’ve covered the basics, I’ll show the process we use to identify team productivity issues internally that help us continuously improve our workflows.

Step #1: Identify Significant Changes in Your Work In Progress Trends

By simply hovering over the WIP average age trendline, you can see the average age of WIP for each day within your chosen time frame. For example, on Aug 27th, the WIP age was 8 days, quite above the typical range. However, by Aug 29th, it returned to its usual levels, indicating the issue was addressed.

Now, what we want to know is what the problem was and what caused it in the first place.

Step #2: Single Out Work Items Leading to Deviations

We’d like to better understand what stands behind that high average age of WIP. To do that, we should go back to Aug 27th and analyze what the board looked like back then. Here’s where the “Aging replay” control proves to be quite useful.

Step #3: Analyze the Root Cause of the Problem

Now that we’ve figured out the item causing team productivity issues, it’s time to take action to prevent a similar situation in the future.

Start by examining the work and digging deep to find out why it got delayed. You can use the “5 Whys” approach for this. Collaborate with your team to brainstorm ways to reduce the risk of future delays.

Most of the time, it’s about making minor adjustments to how you manage your work. This could involve creating new explicit process policies or updating existing ones. Whatever changes you make, ensure that everyone is on the same page and establish them as the new standard, so you don’t face this issue again.

In this specific example, we discovered that the work item was held up due to a legal team dependency, causing the delay. To tackle this, we decided to implement a dynamic reservation system to handle dependencies more efficiently.