Metrics_ How to Improve Key Business Results - Martin Klubeck [105]
The overall grade gives a “feel” for the health of the subject. Rolling up the grades into a “final grade” is possible, but won't always be desirable. It depends on the audience.
The Report Card shows how to display, compile, and report the results of your metrics. It doesn't go into the tools you may choose to use for gathering the data. The organization I used as an example had multiple automated tools, some human-interactive tools, and fully subjective surveys. Check your organization for existing sources of data. There are usually more places for you to gather data (unobtrusively) than you would expect.
Other tools for gathering data should be found and leveraged. The Higher Education TechQual+ Project is just one example of a (free) survey-based tool that you can use—even if you are not in an IT organization, the concepts of the tool can be applied to your services and products.
“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.”
—Henry David Thoreau
Innovation is not coming up with a totally new concept or idea. The greatest innovations come from seeing things that already exist in a new light. It was a great strength of Thomas Edison to see what others missed in their attempts to invent something new.
Conclusion
The Report Card is another mean of creating a scorecard with the added benefit of allowing you to roll up the measures into a single grade if desired. By identifying the anomalies in the measures and information, you can clearly designate which are anomalies and spend your time investigating only those that require the effort. This allows you to:
Identify the areas needing further investigation
Spend resources only where needed
Have an overall “feel” for the health of a service or group of services using a common language for the evaluation
The key isn't in what tools you use to collect, analyze, compile or report the information and metrics you develop. The key is in finding a way of doing this work so that it is easily understood by your audience. Your metrics have to tell the proper story, in the right way, to the correct audience.
Advanced Metrics
You might be thinking, “When should I look at using the other quadrants of the Answer Key?” I've tried my best to keep you from delving into the other quadrants before your organization has had time to work with the Product/Service Health metrics, where you'll get the most benefit initially. This doesn't mean that you can't build metrics to answer specific root questions. But, if you are tasked with developing a metrics program (or are doing the tasking), I'm encouraging you to slowly introduce these concepts and tools into your organization.
Figure 11-1 once again shows the Answer Key, so that we can reference where you've been (effectiveness) and where you're going in this chapter.
Figure 11-1. The Answer Key Revisited
Dipping Your Toes into the Other Quadrants
So, when should you work on the other three quadrants? It's likely that you'll have opportunities in three areas to test the water in the other quadrants before you embark on full metrics programs in each.
1. As Support for Product/Service Health Efforts
As discussed earlier, when working within the Service/Product Health (effectiveness) quadrant, you are likely to encounter opportunities to develop and use Process Health (efficiency) measures. An example is when one of your effectiveness indicators is awry and you want to improve the situation. Let's say your speed to resolve is showing below expectations. After you do your due diligence (investigate), you find out that the time it's taking to resolve your customers' issues is taking longer than it should, based on your organization's service-level agreements. You may then take it upon yourself to work with the team responsible for the service. You may want to define the process and then institute measures along the way to see if you can improve the process. These measures will more than likely fall under Process Health.
You may recall that I also wrote strongly against delving into efficiency meas-