[sunir]

No doubt. So, what does work?

Have you been on a team that has added productivity? Note that most teams get more done by adding labour, but that is not increasing productivity. Rather, getting more or better output per labour hour.

Then, how did you know where to focus effort to improve? And that you've increased productivity? Were the teams relying on improving tools, improving practice, and in what mix?

[themgt]

The basic problem is, there are good ways to run teams and bad ways to run teams, but the good ways in general are organic, contextual, intersubjective. It's hard to distill down to bullet points, much less a damn chart.

The most productive teams are the ones that focus on good people doing good honest work, being fairly rewarded, having a meaningful separation/delegation of responsibility/authority, communication, a knowledge of when to gather data and optimize against it and when not to, etc.

So, any time you try to distill team productivity on this cooperative creative endeavor into some number that you're going to put on a chart and give people shit about, you've already lost. If you don't already have a sense of how productive your team is and what the obstacles to increasing that are, chances are you're just a suit and you need to have someone else to run the team.