Michael E. Porter and Thomas H. Lee, in a recent Harvard Review article, put it this way, “Teams improve and excel by tracking progress over time and comparing their performance to that of peers inside and outside the organization.”

This measurement process goes beyond just tracking savings, although this is what value analysis is all about. It is paramount that you also track and benchmark your:

• Team’s attendance: It is an established fact that when more of your team members show up for meetings, more work gets done. Tracking this metric and acting on it can greatly improve your outcomes.
• Projects completed on time: Teams have a tendency to take forever to get projects completed. It shouldn’t take more than 90 days for most projects. You need to know this information to understand the root cause of your project’s delays.
• Time to complete projects: This gives you a benchmark to compare to your peers. If you find that your project managers are falling behind on their project timetables compared to your peers, you need to find out why.
• Rejected savings: If a project is rejected by a customer, you need to document this fact so you can revisit this project at a later date. From our experience, these savings can be achieved within 2 years by revisiting them, so don’t ignore them.
• Projected vs. actual savings per project: You should have an estimate on the savings to be achieved on each of your projects. Then, you can measure whether you hit your target or not. If you didn’t hit your target savings – why not?

I’m sure you could add a few more measurements that are important to the performance of your value analysis team to this list to measure your team’s progress. What is important to remember is that your value analysis team(s) won’t improve or excel if you don’t track their progress over time and then benchmark how they measure up to your peers inside and outside your healthcare organization.

This is an immutable law of team management: No measurement, no progress! Don’t let anything get in the way (i.e., time, resources, or deadlines) of the measurement of your team’s progress, especially since technologies on the market today can ease the pain of measuring and managing your team’s activities.