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you if you are succeeding (and where to focus your efforts), Efficiency measures will normally tell you “how” to improve. For example, if you determine that you could benefit from delivering the service in a more timely manner (faster), you'll want to look at ways to do it more efficiently—to do the internal processes “faster.” Of course, you'll also want to ensure that you are delivering it at a high quality. You can't improve the speed of delivery and have drastic drops in quality. Both of these are internal process viewpoints.

You can even possibly benefit from some Future Health measures. You will likely need to prove the need for additional resources. You will also likely want assurances that if your unit reaches the goal (30 percent increase) that it will be spared the hatchet. This means that you may want items in the strategic plan that include if-then statements. If you succeed, what happens? Of course, if you fail, the consequences can also be captured. Do you have to achieve the goal in a month? A year? Three years? Is incremental improvement over time acceptable?

So, the goal that is driving your efforts may have come from the Future Health quadrant. It may well be a part of the strategic plan. It can also be considered a “project” or part of a program. In any case, the results are obviously future-focused.

So, does the Employee View fit here also? How does the Organizational Health play? First off, it doesn't have to. Note that the Future Health's inclusion wasn't necessary. Effectiveness and Efficiency are critical, but measures of the strategic level or the project/program levels are not as critical. That said, let's see if it fits.

The first question is how will the results of the efforts affect the workers? Will jobs be lost if the service is deleted? Will the workers be laid off or will they be reassigned? If they succeed, are their jobs secured? If so, for how long? How will the situation affect morale? How will the success or failure affect morale of the unit? How will it affect the morale of the rest of the organization? All of these questions are within the Organizational Health quadrant and all are valid concerns.

Granted that the questions for the third and fourth quadrants didn't require the service catalog at all, but I wanted to give you the full picture of how the measures from the different quadrants could be used to answer a specific root question about a particular service. The catalog was helpful especially for questions derived from the Service/Product and Process Health quadrants.

Bonus Material

Service catalogs are essentially a mature behavior, and there are others that work well with a Metrics Program.

In Why Organizations Struggle So Hard to Improve So Little, I warned against trying to implement mature behaviors in an organization suffering from immaturity. Metrics was listed as one of the most risky ones to undertake.

Along with metrics, some of the other behaviors that are difficult to implement can actually be positively affected if you just attempt a metric program. Even if you are not fully successful, you can have influence on your organization's adoption of the following:

Process maps/process definitions

Process improvement methodologies

Training plans

Strategic plans

Customer feedback tools

These can be encouraged greatly by a metric program. As discussed in Chapter 13 on standards and benchmarks, metrics can drive the organization toward other improvement efforts. When you are trying to develop a process health picture of the organization, you will benefit from having your processes defined (much as the Service/Product Health metrics benefit from a Service/Product catalog). To improve something, you need to understand it. A clear and complete definition of your processes is a necessary starting point for improving those processes.

A good process definition will help you improve the process just through the capture of it.

A metric program can make the need for process definitions obvious to the organization—making its acceptance easier. These process