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Figure 11-3. Quadrant 4 of the Answer Key

Concepts

Let's look at Quadrant Four of the Answer Key. When I talk about future health, I'm not referring to the projected financial situation of an organization. You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned the financial stability at all. That's because the metrics I'm presenting in this book are around health in terms of maturity, not finance.

There are many existing measures of financial health (the Fortune lists are an example) and for measuring the future potential for financial growth. This area is well trodden and I doubt you are being asked to develop or institute these types of metrics. You should be able to find many resources on measuring a company's financial health—like price-to-earnings ratio, liquidity (how much cash the company has on hand), or leverage (the amount of money a company is borrowing in relation to its capital).

The future health of an organization from a maturity standpoint includes how well the organization can take on and achieve large-scale projects and programs. Implementing a metrics program would actually fit under this umbrella. How well can the organization take these complex tasks on? Is the organization capable of more than just getting the day-to-day operations accomplished?

When I coach others on vision setting, I remind them constantly that they can't afford to get bogged down with the tactical. They have to see things at a strategic level, plan at a strategic level, and stay focused on long-range goals. Immature organizations can't do this. If you find that you're swamped with the daily grind and can't lift your head up long enough or look up high enough to see the long-range goals of the organization, your future health is in question.

At basic levels, the organization must be able to set strong goals for the future, prioritize its work, and be able to complete project- or program-level work. If the organization can't do any of these components, chances are it will never grow. It will be stuck in the present.

Project/Program Status Measures

To measure project and program execution requires that you have policies and procedures for carrying out these larger-scale tasks. Normally, projects require cross-functional involvement and sharing resources across different units within (and possibly outside) the organization. The simplest measures to start with around projects are health metrics of the efforts themselves. These can be built around status updates, which may ask the following:

How many projects are active?

How many are in the queue?

How many are on hold?

How many have been completed?

You can go further with the project metrics. Our organization has developed a comprehensive set of measures, including:

How well projects met the schedule

How much we deliver against what was expected

How well we deliver to budget

Quality of the deliverables (how many defects are present)

As with the first and third quadrants, we also want to use triangulation to ensure a rounded set of measures. To that end, you can add in measures of

Sponsor/project owner satisfaction with the results

How well the products of the project are used (level of institutionalization)

Many of the measures of Project/Program Status look like the measures you'll use for goal attainment. This is logical since most projects can be described as a concerted effort to achieve a specific goal.

Strategic Planning and Goal Attainment Measures

If you've developed SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-bound) goals, the measurements have already been defined. These will be measures of success for the goals. Even in this case, I warn against chasing the data rather than realizing the dream.

Say your goal is to “increase membership by 50 percent over the next six months.” That's a pretty clear goal (specific). It's definitely measurable (current membership compared to membership in six months), attainable (let's assume there are enough potential members to make it attainable),