Metrics_ How to Improve Key Business Results - Martin Klubeck [54]
The final component of Organizational Health is reward and recognition. The simple questions may not require data collection. Do you have a formal reward or recognition program? Is it effective? Does it do what you want it to? How do you reward your workers? How do you recognize their accomplishments? Do you only recognize their work-related achievements? And on a more subtle note, do you inadvertently combine recognition and reward, such that recognition only occurs when there is a reward involved?
The bottom line on Organizational Health is an extremely easy one—do you treat your most valuable asset like they are your most valued asset?
Future Health
Figure 5-7. The Answer Key, Quadrant 4, Future Health
The last area of the Answer Key is Future Health (Figure 5-7). It covers the following:
Project/Program status
Strategic planning: How well the organization is implementing the strategic plan
Goal attainment: How well the organization is reaching its goals
Priority setting: How well priorities are being set, and being met
This area assumes that you are working on continuous improvement for the organization. Future Health is not listed last because it isn’t as important as the others. It’s last in the list because most organizations are not ready for attempting metrics in this area. Most organizations need to get the first three areas of the fourth tier under control before they start to look at large-scale improvement efforts.
Many organizations bypass this guidance and jump to measures to show how well they are working to improve processes. They jump on the continuous process improvement wagon. I don’t put much faith in such behaviors since these organizations drop these same efforts as soon as funding becomes tight.
The reason you undertake an improvement effort is more important than if you succeed at it. The only way you can truly succeed is to do the right things for the right reasons.
Measures around the organization’s Future Health are mostly predictive, and this makes them “sexy” to leadership. But more important than predicting the future is encouraging and rewarding true process improvement.
Program and project status measures provide insights for leadership into how these efforts are helping improve the organization. You should expect that progress in process improvement is or will be reflected in the measures captured in the other three areas. If you do a good job on continuous process improvement, the customer view should improve. The business view should also see gains, and the workforce should also benefit. If these three areas aren’t improved by your efforts, you aren’t improving the organization.
Strategic planning, goal attainment, and priority setting are all important things to focus on—but in themselves they are meaningless. If these are not part of a bigger effort to improve the organization, you are just spinning your wheels. These efforts are tough because they require true (and sometimes reckless) commitment to succeeding. You have to want to change. Many organizations pay lip service to this area and don’t really see the effort through to the end—and when we’re talking about “continuous” process improvement—there really isn’t an end.
Answer Key: The Fifth Tier and Beyond
The fifth tier would introduce specific measures for each of the “information” within each of the viewpoints presented. While your root question could conceivably be here, it is unlikely. If you find your question starts here, you probably don’t have a need for a metric. Instead, you probably only need a measure.
The elements you’re most likely to find here are measures. For example, extending from the top branch of