Metrics_ How to Improve Key Business Results - Martin Klubeck [68]
Patience is mostly a lost virtue, so expect many of your Product/Service Health metrics to be related to speed.
In the case of my phone outage, I was unhappy with the time to respond (five days to have the technician show up at my door), but I was pleased with the speed to resolve. The technician fixed the problem in less than 30 minutes.
The last area I used for Delivery was accuracy. This was normally captured in the form of rework. How many cases were reopened after the customer thought it was resolved? Others could include defects per products delivered. There are also errors in service. Did we deliver the right things? Did we deliver to the right people? At the right time? At the right location? There are many areas in which an organization can make mistakes. Accuracy measures the quality of your products or services from the customer's viewpoint.
Triangulation of Perspectives
Triangulation is a simple concept. Use multiple sources of data when you can. Use more than one type of measure. More than one collection method. More than one perspective. In the case of the quadrants you are addressing, the differing perspectives is not referring to the following four viewpoints
Customers'
Business's (managers')
Workers'
Leadership's
Instead, I'm offering the following perspectives:
Objective, non-customer involvement
Customer behaviors (observation) and
Direct customer feedback
In the case of Effectiveness metrics (the place I recommend you begin), you are only dealing with the customer's viewpoint.
“The simultaneous consideration of intrinsic and extrinsic test factors forces every researcher to be self-consciously aware of how his every action can influence subsequent observations. From this perspective research becomes a social act.”2
What if metrics became a “social act?” What if metrics, through triangulation coupled with open sharing of findings, were to become a collaborative event? A social act within the organization's society? It would help eliminate misuse and abuse of data, allow for multiple viewpoints to ensure accuracy of the data and, more importantly, lead to more meaningful interpretations of the metrics (answers). This social act may also lead the organization to ask better questions.
Demographics Don't Count
You may mistakenly choose to triangulate your metrics based on demographics. This is not a true triangulation of the data, but decomposition. For example, at institutes of higher learning, we frequently look at the data based on a demographic of our customer base faculty, staff, and students. Not every customer fits cleanly into one of these three categories, so we also look at non-institute affiliates, officers, and family. While this provides multiple and different data, they are not different views, sources, and methods. They are just a breakout of the data already gathered. This decomposition could be very useful (especially when wanting to know a specific constituent's feedback) but doesn't constitute triangulation.
These breakouts are very good for analyzing a subset of your customer population and allows you to address specific needs of each demographic. But it doesn't satisfy the requirement for triangulation.
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2 Norman K. Denzin, Sociological Methods: A Sourcebook (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1970), pp. 471-472.
According to Denzin, using multiple forms of triangulation within a single investigation leads to higher confidence in the (observed) findings. He also offers that the more diversity in the measures, the methods of collection, the people interpreting