The SQV Framework to Team Effectiveness

Structure + Quality + Velocity

Three different folks in the last ~2 weeks that had read some of my posts in the past asked me about Clickup. They noticed that I'd posted about it multiple times and were interested to know more about it as they were interested in potentially applying some of the principles to their own teams that they were running.

With one of the folks they had started by asking me..

"Ken.. how do I determine how good/efficient my team is? And how much I can improve it?"

And so this then led to talking about Clickup.

And since this was the 3rd conversation on it in a short time, I'd already created a bit of a framework around it. So my short answer to his question was... "Simple. I define the quality of your teamwork by my "SQV Framework". What is the SQV (Structure Quality Velocity) Framework?

In short, its a framework that gives you a way of measuring the communication effectiveness of your team, and thus also a tool for improving it.

You can use this framework to determine a score (out of 100). And if you're really good your score should be up around 80+. I try to get the client org's i work with at a minimum level of 70 and so if you're achieving that.. then you are already quite good. But if your score is <20... well then you guys suck. Sorry. hahahaha

1) Structure (40 pts) By 'Structure' i mean the structure of your communication. If all of the tasks that you work on (which take at least 20 minutes of someone's time) are structured as tasks in Clickup with a clear assignee and problem definition, then your score on this is 40 out of 40. But if instead 80% of all your tasks live as questions & threads on Slack... then you get just 8 points (=20% x 40). Because in my view.. managing projects on Slack is shitty ass project management. LOL

2) Quality (30 pts) By 'Quality' I mean the quality of the information in the tasks/projects that you manage. If, for example, 100% of your clickup cards had a clear context (why are we doing it?), goal ( definition of done), single assignee, updated due date, priority flag, status and thread of updates... then you would get 30.

See this example of what my definition of 'good' looks like.

If instead your clickup cards were a mess and 90% of them had the wrong status, shoddy context/goals, no updates for things that had been done... well then you would get just 3 points (=10% x 30).

3) Velocity (30 pts) By 'Velocity' I mean the number of times in a given day each person clears their Clickup notifications. And I consider the magic number to be 3x. If, for example, each person checked and cleared their Clickup notifications just 1x than this would be a score of 10 (=33% x 30).

If each person clears all their notifications 3x per day this means that the team can rely on Clickup for getting timely responses to their questions.. and they don't need to duplicate the query on Slack to get a faster response. Because if that happens, then more and more communication begins to migrate to Slack.

Kind of reminds me of my old macroeconomics classes.. and the velocity of money, which could essentially drive GDP (ie. a nation's productivity) up. I view team velocity in a similar way. Your total Score (out of 100 points) So your total is added as: Structure: 8 (of 40) + Quality: 3 (of 30) + Velocity: 10 (of 30) = 21 points (bad)

So in this example a score of 21 is bad.. but not yet 'sorry ass'... which I define to be <20.

And you can then set targets... and say things like "Ok team.. in 3 weeks i want us to improve this to a score of 40."

And in 3 weeks you have a method for measuring whether you were able to increase your SQV. Which would in turn, in my view, probably be one of the easiest and most effective ways of getting more out of your team.