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Align Metric Triggered Actions/Thresholds to Plans with Assigned Personnel and Due Dates
Performance metrics that drive no action provide little or no value to an organization. To be truly effective, performance measures must individually or collectively prompt action whereby an opportunity is seized upon or a risk avoided. Thus, high-quality organizational performance measures are directly linked to actions – but what actions, performed by whom, within what timeframe?
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About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
Performance measures reflect the organization’s successes and shortfalls over extended periods of time. Well-maintained metrics include a periodic performance analysis summary capturing underlying drivers and associated follow-on actions. These summaries, however, are typically overwritten with the next analysis rather than being preserved; robbing leaders of critical lessons learned information that could support future performance improvements and more rapid decision-making.
Organizational performance measures drive behaviors but, in order to be effective, the information they provide must be known and acted upon in a timely manner. Today’s business leaders can easily be overwhelmed with information; obscuring critical performance metric action prompts. Furthermore, the fixed publication frequency of performance monitoring reports may preclude leaders from receiving action-prompting information in a timely manner. Automating performance notifications, triggered at the time of occurrence, can help alleviate these issues.
Over time, leaders can grow their performance measurement systems to include almost countless numbers of interrelated metrics. Ensuring these numerous metrics remain well aligned, their output quality and relationship integrity preserved, and their meaning well understood while continuing to be of value to executives, managers, and employees necessitates a method of inventorying the measures themselves and their underlying construction characteristics. In our experience, the optimal method for maintaining such an inventory is through the use of a centralized metrics inventory database.
When developing the picture of organizational performance, many leaders view their metrics in clusters aligned with the organization’s hierarchical structure. While logical, such groupings cannot capture the cross-functional nature of many business processes, systems, and applications. Consequently, the organization’s monitoring system may provide the appearance of healthy performance that is inconsistent with what managers know to exist. Regrouping organizational performance measures often reveals these known issues and brings to light other previously unseen improvement opportunities that can yield great value to the business.
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