How do you really measure personal productivity and, more importantly, how do you justify it to a client?

Brother Ovid,

Having followed along for a few years now as you've related stories about how flakey your clients can be, I respectfuly submit that you are trying to solve the wrong problem by turning this into an issue about your personal productivity. By looking for ways to justify your productivity when you're dealing with a client who can't or won't clearly articulate requirements you are making their problem your problem. That's a recipe for driving yourself nuts.

The best you can hope to do in the situation you're in is to satisfy their requests in an amount of time that's reasonable to them, at a level of quality that's acceptable to them, and for an amount of money that's reasonable to them. It sounds like you're doing this, but if it leaves you feeling defensive about your productivity, perhaps you need a stabler environment.

If you insist on measuring something, measure the stability of the requirements. Track requirements changes, and graph, over time, the average number of changes per requirement, and mean-time-until-change. This shifts the focus back where it belongs.

In reply to Re: (OT) Proving Productivity? by dws
in thread (OT) Proving Productivity? by Ovid

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.