In an earlier post, we discussed 4 metrics for your approval workflow and why they are important. Today, we’ll go into more detail about how to best collect that data.
The obvious part of measuring time to market is also the trickiest: what constitutes the beginning of your project, and what constitutes the end? It may be helpful to first ask, “what insight are we looking to gain from this metric?”
For example, let’s say you want to know how long your video projects typically take so that you can estimate realistic deliverable deadlines. In this scenario, your starting point occurs when activities are solely for video – say, a storyboarding meeting. The end point would be when the approved video is published or turned over to the client. The important item here is to make sure that your start and end points are relevant and consistent.
You will also need to consider how detailed you want your measurements to be. Take for instance, measuring start/end dates versus total hours. It’s certainly easier to note a start date and at the end of the project say, “OK, that took us six weeks.” However, if you want details on total hours spent on your project across all team members, then that’s going to be more difficult. If you have a time tracking solution in place you should be able to pull this data there, otherwise there are many free tools online that can help your team to track their time.
It’s best to not expend any more effort than is necessary. If you’re trying to get a general sense of how long a project takes, simply tracking the start and end dates should be sufficient. If your goal is to figure out the time requirements for various project components though, you may need to drill down and track hours.
In future posts, we’ll go into more detail about each of measuring other metrics and show how you can track them with inMotion.