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to the left is context for the question. As your organization matures, you’ll move your questions to the left, asking questions from a more strategic position. If your root question were in tier two, then tier three would represent the metrics you could use and tier four would represent information. The measures and data would be defined for each information set—and could become a fifth and sixth tier if necessary.

The Answer Key not only keeps you focused and helps you determine what area you’re interested in; it also provides some standard metrics, information, and measures, depending on where your root question falls.

Product/Service Health (effectiveness)

Figure 5-4. The Answer Key, Quadrant 1, Product/Service Health

The following are the main components of Product/Service Health (Figure 5-4):

Delivery: How well are you delivering your products and/or services?

Usage: Are your products and/or services being used?

Customer satisfaction: What do your customers think of your products and/or services?

Each component can be broken down into smaller bits—making it more palatable. Delivery is a good example for this as it is a higher-level concept. I tend to break delivery into the following parts:

Availability: Is the service/product available when the customer wants it?

Speed: How long does it take to deliver the service/product?

Accuracy: Do we deliver what we say we will or are there errors involved?

The driving force behind Product/Service Health is the customer. We don’t care who is “responsible” for the issue. We don’t care if you have any control over the situation or condition. All we’re trying to see is how the customer views our products and services. This simplistic way of looking at your organization is valuable because it makes it easy to focus on what is most important.

Process Health (efficiency)

Figure 5-5. The Answer Key, Quadrant 2, Process Health

The other component of Return vs. Investment is efficiency, or is the organization doing things the “right way?” This (Figure 5-5) captures a business view that all stakeholders should want to claim. The following, tested components of efficiency remain relevant:

Cost: What is the cost-benefit of the way we perform our processes?

Time: Time is akin to speed in the customer view. Many times the same data and sources can be reused for this measure. How much time does it take to perform a task or process?

Resource allocation: How efficiently do we distribute the work? Do we assign work by type and amount?

Quality: Quality is accuracy from the business point of view. Even if we have redundant systems providing 100 percent uptime, we will need to track that reliability (for each of those systems) so that we can best maintain them.

Many organizations focus too much on cost and forget that their concerns should first be based around whether the organization is doing the right things (effectiveness) and only then if it is doing them the right way (efficiency). Instead, many organizations latch onto any perceived faults in cost and then react without deep or critical thought. This error is compounded by the lack of information about the costs of services and production. This is especially noticeable in the soft industries. Manufacturing industries usually have a good handle on cost data, but soft industries like information technology, software development, or education find it very difficult to price out their products and services. This is logical, since these organizations normally have trouble defining what products and services they produce. Ask a dean of a given college what products and services the organization delivers. Then take a step further and see if the cost of those offerings is documented.

Time, especially when it is connected to cost as a delimiter (person/hours), is one of the most abused pieces of information. Managers jump on the metrics bandwagon when they start to believe that they can ask for data that will allow them to manage (not coach or lead) their people without having to actually talk to them or get to know