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Measuring the productivity of employees
has been one of the concerns of IT organisations worldwide. It is
essential to calculate the cost of the project vis-a-vis the time
estimate. While calculating the lines of coding (Loc) has generally
been the common criteria for programmers, it is not always considered
an effective measure of the actual work done. The time spent on
activities like attending training programmes, participating in
meetings, co-ordinating with colleagues or conceptualising, is not
taken into account. What is therefore the effective criteria? Are
there any international benchmarks? Interestingly most companies
have their own home-grown productivity calculators to track the
progress of their projects.
Productivity can be measured based on different
metrics. These can range from work-hours spent on a project to dollars
spent per line of code to dollars spent on defects, etc. It becomes
imperative to measure productivity before starting a project to
calculate the cost/time factor. “When we talk about productivity
it encompasses the people as well as the systems built around them,”
says Jagdish Ramaswamy, general manager of Mission: Quality at Wipro
Limited. Pointing out that productivity in software is usually measured
in Loc/person day of code generated, Ramaswamy adds that it is not
only a measure of just the people but the entire system of code
generation which includes use of automated tools where feasible
and applicable.
The monetary value of a project compared
to the man-months spent on it gives a broader perspective of productivity.
This however is not sufficient at the micro level. “Project-wise
productivity, specifically in the IT industry, needs to be maintained
at micro levels rather than macro levels, and in this regard we
measure and maintain productivity benchmarks for each project, taking
into consideration time, training requirements and Key Result Area
(KRA) output per employee,” says Anuradha Duttagupta, head
of HR at leading banking solutions company Infrasoft Technologies.
She reminds that measuring productivity is an integral part of a
project manager’s functions as it helps in determining accurate
time expenditures when billing clients or projects.
 The
role of an IT worker is often a determining factor for measuring
productivity. Srinivas Kulkarni, head of technology and knowledge
management at Nihilent Technology elaborates: “Some roles,
like that in BPO organisations, are relatively easy to measure (in
terms of a certain complexity handled per unit time, turnaround
time for specific types of transactions, etc), while development
related roles require a more comprehensive handling.” Kulkarni
lists the ways a developer’s (real coder’s) productivity
could be measured in the following ways:
* The traditional approach of number of
lines coded per unit time.
* Function points developed per unit time
(this allows for a solution’s environment to be taken into
account).
* Number of defects produced (a negative
measure).
* Number of defects detected (for testers),
and fixed (for developers).
* Turnaround time for fixing defects of
a given severity.
“Productivity within an IT organisation
differs from function to function. Which means, what constitutes
productivity of a programmer will be very different from the productivity
of a project manager. Once we have defined the individual productivity
norms, it is easier to focus action areas for improving it,”
says R Balasubramanian, vice president-India operations of Market
Probe, an international market research firm.
The difference
Calculation of productivity varies for
services and product companies. Say Duttagupta: “In a services
oriented company, the employees are constantly challenged by newer
assignments compared to a product development based organisation.
Hence it is easier to maintain a high productivity level in the
organisation due to high learning opportunity to the employee. In
a product development organisation, there is more reliance on intra
project task rotation, to keep the employees in a constant learning
curve environment.”
Balasubramanian states that the key difference
between services and product sectors is in terms of tangibility
of the measures used to clock productivity. He asserts that today,
even these differences are vanishing, with very precise measurements
being put in place for service delivery in service organisations.
According to Kulkarni in software development
the rigour is lower as the target user is known. On the contrary
products involve a wider user base and consequently rigorous specification
and testing. Consequently, while the measures might be the same,
their relative emphasis and rigour changes.
The norms
Wipro has adopted the Six Sigma methodology
as a benchmark to drive these measures and set the goals according
to the past performances. The company participates in benchmarking
forums like Metagroup and SPIN, etc, informs Ramaswamy. At Infrasoft
the benchmarks are an ever evolving process and are set on every
project and client.
The international norms for measuring productivity
are usually statistical norms. “For instance, the International
Function Point User Group (IFPUG) has a data about productivity
norms, which can be adopted and then tuned based on an organisation’s
own experience,” states Kulkarni. At Nihilent, Function Point
based measures are used to collect and analyse productivity data.
Kulkarni believes that the norms can be only used as guidelines
as each organisation’s experience keeps varying. This depends
on several factors: the technology, skill sets, past experiences,
tools available, process maturity, etc. The measures help in estimation,
and the actual data must be analysed and used to refine the basis
as one learns from projects.
IFPUG is a non-profit, member-governed
organisation. Its mission is to promote and encourage effective
management of application software development and maintenance activities
through the use of Function Point Analysis (FPA) and other software
measurement techniques. The FPA technique quantifies the functions
contained within software in terms that are meaningful to the software
users. The measure relates directly to the business requirements
that the software is intended to address. Other business measures,
such as the productivity of the development process and the cost
per unit to support the software, can also be readily derived.
Tools for measuring productivity
Different kinds of tools are available
to measure as well as improve the productivity of software development,
many of them being developed in-house. Say Ramaswamy of Wipro, “We
have a process automated system that calculates the productivity
on a monthly basis and this is a home grown system.” Duttagupta
informs that Infrasoft also uses an internally developed cycle planner
tool for managing and monitoring employee productivity, “This
helps us in keeping up to high quality and time standards for every
live project in the organisation.”
Pointing out that a comprehensive and continuous
training program plays an important role in maintaining the high
productivity standards and benchmarks, Duttagupta adds that internal
employee training is an often neglected point, while analysing the
productivity standards.
Measuring productivity is not just important
for an organisation, but also an IT worker. It is only when an individual
is aware of his productivity that he can know how much he has improved.
Send feedback to - sudipta@expresscomputeronline.com
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