“Have you done your homework?”
When it came to my homework nothing else mattered to my parents. They didn’t ask how well I had done it or what I had learnt. ‘Done’ was what we measured when it came to homework in my house growing up.
We’ve all heard a variation of the phrases, what you measure gets managed or you can’t improve what you don’t measure. These are used to encourage people to track elements of their businesses and put plans in place to improve how their businesses perform.
What most miss is that measuring the right variable is difficult because there are so many to choose from. Knowing what is important and then finding the metric to track it requires discarding metrics that ‘feel’ important or that look sexy. It means telling people that the work they do isn’t worth measuring and therefore not all that important.
I’m of the opinion that teams shouldn’t have more than 5 metrics they refer to regularly. Everything else is either a contributor to the most important data points or noise.
And if you’re measuring performance you must track change. There is a lag in any data you look at. Business issues that lead to worrying declines in your metrics may have existed for months. Know what your lag is, track what you’ve changed and align these changes to the variables you measure.