Metrics_ How to Improve Key Business Results - Martin Klubeck [63]
By starting with effectiveness measures, you will also allow your organization to ease into using metrics with less fear, less uncertainty, and less doubt. The organization will still have some worries over what you’re introducing, but by starting with the customers’ viewpoint, you mitigate most of the risk. You can also use these metrics to produce high returns—understanding and pleasing customers are really the foundation of long-term business success.
It is convenient that the best place to start is also the easiest and safest, while the other possible choices require more effort, damage control, and has the highest risks for failure.
The following are important points to remember:
Future Health metrics require a readiness most organizations lack.
Organizational Health metrics speak to the workers’ situation, which most are not ready to hear; and if there is a lack of trust, most workers are not ready to share.
The lack of trust that makes measuring Organizational Health difficult makes collecting accurate data on how well the business is run, Process Health, unlikely.
Product/Service Health metrics require knowledge of the customer—who the customer is, what they see as important, and what they expect.
Conclusion
Figure 6-7. The Answer Key, with tiers and quadrants
While the Answer Key (Figure 6-7) offered multiple options for metrics development, the right place to start is with Product/Service Health (effectiveness), the customer’s viewpoint. Not only is this the safest course of action, it is also the best since it builds a foundation for the other quadrants in the third tier. If you create a working, and thereby useful, metrics program around the effectiveness of your product and service health, you will build the trust necessary to branch into efficiency metrics.
Once you’ve tackled the Return vs. Investment quadrants, you’ll have a basis of maturity preparing your organization for the State of the Union quadrants. The conclusion is as follows:
Start with the customer view (effectiveness measures). Take your time and fully realize the benefits of this level of metrics. Let it become an accepted part of the organization’s culture.
Use the business view (efficiency measures) sparingly and when needed to investigate further into ways to improve effectiveness. (I’ll provide more insights into this later.)
After you have built a healthy level of trust within the organization and a successful effectiveness-based metrics program, branch into other quadrants.
While management will want to go to the business view next, except for those measures necessary to improve effectiveness, I recommend skipping efficiencies and moving to the workers’ viewpoint (Organizational Health). This will help build trust and result in greater and faster overall gains to the organization’s effectiveness. If the workforce is truly the greatest asset—after developing metrics to improve the customers’ experience, the next priority should be to improve the workforce’s. Address Future Health metrics primarily as a tool to determine the likelihood of achieving the organization’s goals. Then use them to determine if the goals were achieved. If you focus on the strategic plans portion of Future Health, you can create another safe haven for metrics.
In Chapter 11, Employing Advanced Metrics, I will go into more detail on the benefits and means for developing metrics in each of the third tier’s quadrants. For now, it is enough to promote Product/Service Health as the correct starting point and to stress the need to wait on the other areas until the time is right.
Triangulation
Essential to Creating Effective Metrics
And so it was, Momma mouse gave birth to three beautiful, but blind, mice. Once they were of age, the farmer's wife took pity on them and decided