Metrics_ How to Improve Key Business Results - Martin Klubeck [55]
Unique customers by month, by type
Number of purchases, by type
Number of repeat customers
It is unnecessary to list possible measures for each of the fourth tier’s elements. It won’t make any sense to try to list each of what would be in tier six or seven—lower-level measures or data. In the examples for Usage, we might see data points as follows:
Number of customers
Names of each customer
Products listed by type
Dates and times of each purchase
How to Use the Answer Key: Identify Types of Measures
The Answer Key can be used to identify measures you can use to answer your root question. If you have done your homework and defined the root question and developed your abstract design, you are now ready for the next step—identifying possible measures to fill out the metric.
The Answer Key can help with this phase of the process. Take your root question and metric design and determine where you are on the Answer Key. If your question deals with the value of the organization, then you’re on the top tier, Return vs. Investment. If your question is in the realm of managing organizational resources, you’re on the lower tier, State of the Union.
We used some examples of root questions earlier. One was based on the distribution of work. This would fit under the fourth tier, Process Health–Resource Allocation. Using this tool, we not only can identify the type of measures we’ll need, but we understand the area of focus of our question. Moving to the left from Resource Allocation, we can see that our question is dealing with the business view (investment). If our question is a root question, we can use the Five Whys. And now we can also ask if our concerns are bigger than just Resource Allocation (measure centered). Are our concerns actually around Process Health? Are we missing the measures around cost, time, and quality?
If your root question is answered by just one of the measures in the fourth tier, chances are you don’t have the root question. You definitely don’t have a metric.
Another example we used was, “What is the value of our web/teleconferencing service?” This also falls under Return vs. Investment and could fit under the (Customer view) Product/Service Health–Usage or –Customer Satisfaction. But, it also can fit under the (Business view) Process Health, especially since it is full of cost-benefit measures. Often, your metric may dictate the need for measures from more than one category. Logically they usually come from the same larger area—Return vs. Investment or State of the Union. So, many times if you have a metric for effectiveness, you may also be measuring things useful for efficiency. I find this to be particularly true with time. Consider time to resolve an issue vs. time to accomplish a task. If the task is problem resolution, the measures are the same.
Using the Answer Key allows us to do a quick and easy quality check on the measures we’ve identified. For example, if the metric is a Worker view (based on the root question), and you find some of the measures you identified are from the Customer view (like delivery measures), then either those measures are wrong for the metric, or, possibly your metric is not the right one for answering the question. As a general rule, I find that the measures are usually misplaced, rather than that the metric is incorrect.
One more example. We also covered, “How responsive is the help desk?” This could be time in the efficiency category (time to respond) and it can also be represented by effectiveness measures—specifically delivery. When we look at speed and availability under delivery (another measure is accuracy) we can see how measures of both would go into telling the story of how responsive the help desk is to customer needs. The use of Time to Respond/Time to Resolve would use some of the same data points, although that “view” of the data would not be useful for answering our particular question.
Bonus Material
Since this chapter introduces the practicum portion