What is Responsiveness
Responsiveness measures the time taken for a team member to respond to a request of another team member or of the whole project team.
Why Responsiveness matters
Members of a responsive team are able to remove blockers and progress with their work quicker than less responsive teams.
What ‘good’ looks like
Mature teams will determine their own guardrail for acceptable levels of timelines when getting responding to requests for information. Setting these expectations is especially helpful for teams working remotely or in a distributed manner across different timezones.
How Umano measures Responsiveness
Umano determines the speed of a project's communications by looking at:
The time between questions and answers sent in communication tools such as Slack
The time between questions and answers sent in project management tools like Confluence and Jira
The time between questions and answers sent in pull requests on code management tools like Bitbucket
What’s included?
Included | Not included |
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Practices that influence Responsiveness
The percentage of requests that are tagged
The percentage of requests answered from previous sprints
The percentage of unanswered requests at the end of the sprint
Tips for quicker responses
Include a check in your daily stand up if anyone is waiting on a response from one of the team members. Especially if there is a lower score (for the previous day)
With the wide range of tools most teams use, it is not strange that notifications can get lost. Keep a personal record for pending questions.
Set clear expectations on what’s an acceptable time to respond to request for help from one of your peers, especially if your team is working across multiple time zones