Methods to Measure the Success of Your Performance Measurement and Attribution Team (and Why It’s Important)

Utilizing a combination of quantitative, qualitative, and feedback metrics to gauge the success of your performance team will provide you with critical insights into the team’s productivity and efficiency.

The success of a performance measurement and attribution team requires that investment decisions are well supported, internal stakeholders receive accurate insights, and the organization maintains transparency in its investment outcomes. Successful teams provide clear, actionable feedback that can influence portfolio management, compliance, and risk assessment. A high-performing team should not only meet current demands but also anticipate future needs. Below are several methods to measure your team’s success.

Effective Quantitative Metrics

Not all functions within the team, from production lifecycle to time-to-completion to analyzing results, carry the same weight. To understand your efficiency metrics, separating responsibility volumes will help you determine the ideal workload per analyst, among other benefits.

The results of the metrics mentioned above are most useful in helping management evaluate how effectively the team utilizes resources, including time management. Getting a clear picture of the team's productivity provides many advantages while highlighting areas of strength and opportunities for improvement, such as insights into processes that need automation to increase efficiency. This can also expose gaps in the workflow ─ for example, where the team has taken on additional validations or reconciliations from historical errors that have occurred, essentially creating a Band-Aid for an upstream process or technology gap. A firm’s ability to track volumes and workloads over time can also drive business cases to optimize the team’s responsibilities and support requests for additional resources.

A key component is tracking ad-hoc requests. Although self-service capabilities have increased in this area, performance teams still spend a portion of their time responding to ad-hoc and customized requests, which can be time-consuming. Understanding where the volume of requests is coming from and on what data can help drive the direction of increasing standard reporting or developing additional self-service options.

Your firm’s performance measurement and attribution team relies heavily on your data integrity. Poor data quality undermines credibility and prevents meaningful analysis ─ in addition to extra work. Understanding where data is a hindrance can help drive projects for better data management and a smoother workflow.

Effective Qualitative Metrics

Assess how well team members communicate with each other. Collaboration and support play an essential role in the team’s overall success. Gauge engagement of the analysts through participation in team meetings and encourage idea generation and open discussions with each member to assess morale. High collaboration and engagement lead to knowledge-sharing, team and individual growth, and increased staff retention.

Equally important is maintaining communication and engagement with the team’s stakeholders. Set a meeting cadence with the users (for example, client-supporting teams and the front office) to validate which data is utilized, review content/templates, and provide clear understanding of the limitations and/or opportunities.

Effective Feedback Metrics

Solicit feedback regularly from the respective performance, attribution, and analytic consumers. This will provide insights into trends, blind spots, and areas where consumers feel they could be better supported. It will also validate what is working well. By combining these methods, the performance measurement and attribution team’s success can be measured holistically. This approach creates a process to monitor team and individual performance, identify inefficiencies, and provide support for business initiatives. It also drives improvements for optimization while ensuring that team members provide high value and remain aligned with the investment organization’s strategic goals.

If you haven’t yet, check out the executive summary of Cutter’s Performance Measurement and Attribution whitepaper. To learn more about optimizing your firm’s performance measurement and attribution or to speak with a Cutter research analyst or consultant, contact us at [email protected].