Keep away from These Pitfalls When Measuring Your Technique’s Efficiency

Measuring the efficiency of a enterprise goes hand in glove with its enterprise technique. Or it ought to. However surprisingly, as I’ve witnessed firsthand over an prolonged interval, organizations in all sectors battle to match their technique design with their efficiency measurement.

That is massively necessary as a result of it’s nearly inconceivable to trace the success of a enterprise technique if there are not any dependable key efficiency indicators (KPIs). Conversely, poor efficiency measurement can encourage misdirected strategic targets. Each can result in repeat performances of the identical failed selections.

Right here I discover three widespread traps that managers fall into when measuring their technique’s efficiency and clarify keep away from them.

1. Non-matching frameworks

Roger is the CEO of a state authorities’s major roads division. When he was appointed, he put in his favored technique framework based mostly on “areas.” These got here with their very own acronym – KRAs, key end result areas. So, he organized the principle roads strategic plan below objects comparable to power discount, governance, and materials sourcing.

The difficulty was that it didn’t match major roads’ present efficiency measurement framework, which was organized round packages comparable to highway security, highway effectivity, and highway upkeep.

The disconnect was massively dysfunctional with a lot government time and power expended making an attempt to make issues work. As one government wryly noticed, “it was like making an attempt to place elements of a Ford right into a Mercedes Benz. They simply wouldn’t match.”

How one can repair it: Arrange round key stakeholders.

Marjorie heads up a not-for-profit entity which takes care of individuals with autism. When she joined the group as CEO, she was confronted with what she describes as “a disconnect between our strategic planning framework and the way our KPIs had been assembled.”

The group’s strategic plan was structured round “key points” like price range overruns, acquiring grants, and hiring employees. The KPIs had been a hotchpotch of metrics drawn from quite a lot of sources together with HR, accounting and finance, and operations together with working bills and the variety of employees coaching programs run.

Her answer was to refocus each technique and the KPIs across the group’s key stakeholders. These had been individuals with autism and their households, authorities, donors and supporters, and employees.

For instance, within the case of the stakeholder employees, Marjorie’s group needed to ratchet up innovation across the providers they supplied for individuals with autism and their households. This required attracting first-rate clinicians by boosting the group’s place on employment circumstances. One indicator of success was a rise within the variety of job functions from suitably certified psychologists. “Finally,” she says, “our group’s strategic plan and scorecard can converse to one another.”

2. Measuring exercise

Right here’s how I illustrate this drawback to teams of managers at my workshops. I say to them: “I suggest to measure my efficiency right now by measuring the variety of slides I take advantage of. And if I’m actually drained on the finish of the day I’ll know I’ve finished an excellent job. Would you be pleased with these as measures of my efficiency?”

My viewers at all times says no. “Why?” I ask. “As a result of they’re measures of exercise, not of outcomes,” they are saying. “And who decides on these outcomes ?” I inquire. “We do,” comes the common response. In that second my viewers “will get it.” I can see it of their faces.

How one can repair it: Concentrate on outcomes.

Angelo heads up the nationwide workplace of a widely known model of development instruments. When it got here to measuring the efficiency of his enterprise, he defined: “We’d get collectively and give attention to what we do. The KPIs we produced had been invariably about processes.” They broke this fixation by specializing in the outcomes his group produced for its key stakeholders – clients, suppliers, staff, and the mother or father firm.

Measuring this efficiency includes a two-way avenue with outcomes going each methods – for the enterprise and for stakeholders. Angelo and his crew prevented making assumptions about what the outcomes can be for his or her stakeholders. As an alternative, they interviewed key stakeholders to study if the outcomes necessary to them had been recognized. The interviews additionally revealed new KPIs that Angelo and his crew would by no means have considered.

3. Lack of focus

Sebastian is CEO of a suburban council. He needed to develop a scorecard of the council’s efficiency linked to the council’s strategic plan. So, he collected measures from departments under him, comparable to neighborhood improvement, atmosphere and planning, and company providers, and he created a composite record. This record was lengthy and left him dissatisfied. Lots of the measures didn’t appear in any respect associated to the council’s aims.

How one can repair it: Cascade relatively than amalgamate your metrics.

Helen is a newly put in principal of a giant, prestigious, and really costly personal ladies’ college. To develop a scorecard for the college, she gathered measures from tutorial departments comparable to science, English and arithmetic. However, as with Sebastian, the composite set of KPIs didn’t work as measures of the college’s efficiency.

She fastened this by beginning once more. This time, relatively than amalgamating measures from backside to high, she developed KPIs within the reverse order — from high to backside. The method she says, “allowed me to kill two birds with the one stone. It uncovered gaps within the KPI set for the college and supplied a match between the college’s strategic plan round college students, dad and mom, academics and employees, authorities, [and] the neighborhood… [It also] supplied an efficient scorecard based mostly on the outcomes for these similar teams.”

Helen had discovered a basic idea in efficiency measurement – degree of research. Measures that apply at one degree, e.g., revenue on the company degree, don’t apply at one other degree, e.g., an inner division like HR. Equally, measures which might be apt at a division degree will not be acceptable on the company degree.

. . .

It’s simple for gaps to develop between your strategic plan and your KPIs should you don’t apply a framework constantly throughout each – and also you’re definitely not alone if this has occurred to you.  As you shut the gaps, nonetheless, bear in mind above all that measuring efficiency is basically about measuring your relationships together with your group’s key stakeholders.  Your KPIs, subsequently, should be formed by what these stakeholders anticipate from you and never by what you suppose you ought to be doing.