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or your organization is implementing a process improvement effort, you will likely be doing some Process Health measures for those efforts. I'm not in any way trying to deter you from doing so. Any of these metrics and their measures can be used to answer specific root questions. I am suggesting that you don't create a stand-alone metrics program to provide organizational health monitoring in this quadrant until you've built up enough equity in your organization that your workforce trusts your intentions and use of these measures.

Conclusion

Advanced metrics are very useful and can help an organization grow in many ways. They also introduce risks to the organization. To mitigate these risks and get the most benefits from the metrics, I highly recommend you work from root questions for any metrics you want to create. The metrics should only “live” as long as they answer the root question and as long as the question is still in need of answering.

If you must create a metrics program that lives on its own account, without a specific root question, I highly recommend you start with Product/Service Health (effectiveness). Once that is fully implemented and you've built up a level of trust and understanding of the ways to use (and not use) metrics, look into incorporating the other three quadrants. Incorporate them in the following order:

Quadrant 3: Organization Health

Quadrant 4: Future Health

Quadrant 2: Process Health (efficiency)

Creating the Service Catalog

How to Enhance the Report Card

One of my biggest challenges when I created the Report Card for my organization was getting the leadership to agree to a list of core or key services. Since I successfully won the battle of using effectiveness measures over efficiency ones, I would need a list of the services (or products) to be evaluated in the Service/Product Health Metrics.

Many organizations are function-centered. You can see this in the organization chart and the way the parts of the organization work with each other. There are sections for marketing, customer relations, project design, and development, test, and implementation. There are areas whose focus is customer support like help desks and second-tier support functions. These units are not focused on a given service or even the concept of services. They are focused on the functions they provide. They are focused on the “task at hand” and the “job.”

This is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is in direct contrast to what you get when you structure your organization around services. By focusing on services, your organization can truly embrace continuous improvement and become a more effective team.

Think of it this way: if you are functionally focused, you concentrate on delivering your functions to your customer—internal or external. Once you have completed your part of the process and have finished your tasks, your interest in the process is done. On the other hand, if you are service-centered, there are no “hand offs.” Each function understands how their efforts fit into the overall delivery of the service. Being service-oriented encourages teamwork. It encourages a customer-centered viewpoint. It moves an organization away from individualism (including departmental silos) and moves the organization toward maturity.

Besides the benefits to the organization's maturation, being service-oriented helps in the development of meaningful metrics. This is especially true if you are working on the first quadrant of the Answer Key, Product/Service Health. Since the quadrant is focused on the customers' viewpoint and on improving the health of the services and products you provide—having the organization focused on those same services makes the metrics much easier.

Since our organization was primarily service-oriented, the leadership agreed to start our metric program with an assessment of the health of the key or core services. The problem was getting the directors of the different areas within the organization to agree on which services were core.

While I innocently (and naively) thought this should