💡 How to calculate Efficiency: Wait Time & Touch Time?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are widely adopted metrics to assess the effectiveness of practices, products, projects, or initiatives. In project planning, KPIs are meticulously defined to gauge performance, beginning from day zero and tracked throughout every stage. Initiating a project with a well-defined objective requires a systematic measurement of effectiveness and the accuracy of steps taken toward the goal. KPIs play a crucial role in providing concrete insights into decision-making, reinforcing their validity, and evaluating the overall quality of ongoing efforts.

Indicator Efficiency can be defined as the balance between touch time and wait time. These metrics are interconnected with the duration it takes to develop a feature and the time spent waiting before deploying it in production.

To calculate Efficiency, you first need to calculate two indicators - Wait and Touch time.

Touch Time = sum working time by closed items per period in a particular state.  

Follow this guide to calculate Touch Time using Time in State extension:

1. Select a query for the report generation.

2. Select a calendar for the correct calculation.

3. Filter Work Items by Closed.

4. (Optionally) Select the item’s range in the “Work Item“ dropdown (to display items closed in such period).

5. Select a period in the “Time range” dropdown (to display the time calculation for the selected item range in the specific time range).

6. Look at the State column, and the time that item was in such an active state (for example Doing, Active, etc).

Open

Wait Time

To calculate the wait time of Work Items, you can use the Time in State metric along with specific state transitions that represent waiting periods. Here's a general approach:

1. Identify Relevant States. Determine which states in your Work Item process represent periods of waiting. For example, you might have states like "New," "Active," "Resolved," and "Closed." The time spent in states like "New" and "Resolved" could be considered wait times.

2. Generate a report using the same steps as for calculating Touch Time above.

Next, after generating the report, export it to Excel and calculate the sum of only those states that fit the Wait Time definition separately and the Touch Time definition separately.

Divide the sums and get the Efficiency percentage.