One of the pre-requisites for a group to mesh into a real team is a common purpose or focus. Without clear focus prioritisation is difficult and energy and enthusiasm readily dissipates.
And yet … in complex work environments there are inevitably many other bits and pieces that need to be done beyond the #1 thing, and if we neglect these completely our organisations would fall to pieces.
As a coach I work with many teams that struggle with the cognitive overwhelm of low focus, and senior managers who understandably want teams to deliver high value pieces of work rather than “a bit of this and that”. By measuring focus (or lack there of) we can have conversations that lead to real improvement, and usefully blend qualitative insight and creativity with quantitive simplification. We can get more focussed about getting more focussed!
For organisations moving to Agile teams this quantitative view of focus can be instructive. For example, the popular Scrum approach pretty much demands a high focus factor (70% to 80%) to work properly. Too often it is imposed willy-nilly, leading to reasonable push-back. If the starting focus factor is lower than (say) 60% please consider starting with Kanban instead, and track and attempt to raise your focus factor over time. As you do, the various Scrum practices will make more sense in your context. Alternatively, you can try raising the focus factor first and go straight to Scrum, but this can be dangerous. What will be the downsides by trying to jump it up straight away?
Regardless, you will likely want to increase your focus factor (if it’s low) to improve cohesion and reduce scatteredness.
If it gets too high it can be a problem too. For teams with 90% or higher check to see if they’re living in a bubble, disconnected from the rest of the organisation.
Calculating the Focus Factor
Quantifying your focus factor is simple. Just measure (or estimate) how much work you do in whatever units you like and apportion it amongst different activities.
- Major focus: How much work does your team devote to the biggest item? Call that B.
- Total work: How much work does the team do in total? Call that T
- Focus factor: Take the ratio B / T and express it as a percentage.
Examples
- 30 units of work / week on a new project; 10 units on supporting past projects: 30 / 40 = 75% focus factor
- Support work across 5 different systems, with 30% of calls devoted to the most troublesome one: Focus factor = 30%
Does Focus Factor scale up and down?
Why, yes it does!
Is your organization or department pursuing lots of disjointed objectives?
An individual example: Coaching four different teams? Focus factor ~ 25%
Measuring focus factor across multiple scales can be used cross-scale. A group of specialists will have individuals with high individual focus factors, but may have low “team” focus. I wouldn’t necessarily use the same percentages at the individual level: often juniors need more focus while they build their skills while more experienced people need to be across more diverse and complex demands — lower focus at the task level, but hopefully coming together in a good cause!
In team-level Agile we favour T-shaped people (generalising specialists) who will focus mainly on their speciality (main focus), while also being able to pinch-hit and collaborate elsewhere. At scale, a team-of-teams will do better to have a higher level joint focus so that they collaborate more closely with nearby teams (same tribe, ART, etc.) than more distant ones.
So what?
If your team has a higher purpose or charter mapped out, is that where your focus lies?
If your focus factor is too low for comfort, you’re probably feeling scattered and may have motivation issues. Start problem-solving! What can you do to improve your focus? Track and publicise your results.
Taking action to raise the focus factor can help reduce excessive cognitive load, a peril of complex knowledge work.
If you’re running a team-of-teams (e.g. an ART in SAFe or a Tribe) what’s the picture like at scale? Are some of your teams super-focussed while others are scattered? What does this tell you about the system? Can you evolve your structure at scale to not only raise focus factor, but also reduce outliers?
Conclusion
Team focus factor is an easy-to-measure metric that tells you a bit about how your team is going that can motivate improvement, guide choice of Agile framework (Scrum or Kanban?), and can give insights at scale.
More broadly, this is an example of a light-weight measure that is designed to give insight for indirect improvement rather than being directly tied to bottom-line results.
Prager Consulting 