Search results matching tag 'Metrics'

EODB Assessments and Anniversary

christina.sullivan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:45:00 GMT

I can't believe that I have been blogging a year! I'm not a super-blogger by any means and certainly don't have the volume of posts that most bloggers do, but I'm pretty proud that I've stuck with it a year. It has been challenging, interesting, and a very positive experience overall. So, here is to 1 year. The goal for the next year is to post more and collaborate more with other bloggers in my subject area.

I've been toying with the idea for quite a while to develop an assessment that companies can use to evaluate how easy they are to do business with at a more detailed level and from a customer's perspective. I have tons of survey data that includes “How easy is it to do business with (X company)”?; however, very few actually break "easy" down into components

I've reviewed the Forester's Customer Service Innovation Framework and Self-Assessment http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,47688,00.html and think Natalie L. Petouhoff has done an excellent job of defining 150 best pratice capabilities. Although I like her framework, I'd like one that could be applied to any business process.

A former boss of mine, Jerry Wittig, developed a draft assessment that I think could provide an excellent starting point. It had the following categories which could be rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest score and 5 being the best. The idea is that the customer of company X would rate their company interactions based upon the following categories and sub attributes:

Effortless - less time, fewer steps, fewer decisions

Comfortable - friendly relationships/dialogs, free of embarassment

Informal - fewer worries, less rules/constraints

Unforced - per my timeline, few demands

Rewarding - high benefit for effort, unexpected pleasures

Jerry passed away some years ago and I'd like to think his legacy and work continues. What assessments have you seen/used for assessing ease of doing business? What other characteristics do you think should be included in such an assessment? Send me your ideas/comments.

“Metrics Madness” – You’re Nuts!

Scott Berg — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:18:00 GMT

I was catching up on my reading last night and happened to read Al Ries’s Column “Metric Madness: Running biz by the numbers is just not logical” in the May 4, 2009 issue of AdAge.

With all due respect, Mr. Ries makes an argument that marketing is to focused on math, ROI, etc. I’ll let you review the column yourself, but Mr. Ries ends his article with the following… “Mathematics is logical. Marketing is not. That’s why marketing is so difficult to learn.”

Well Mr. Ries… I’ve got a different take on the situation and frankly don’t agree with a number of points. Let me explain.

The Language of Business of Numbers: Guess what, I didn’t make up this rule, but any good manager, CEO or marketing person should understand this.

The purpose of companies is to make money. Yep, it’s as simple as that. That point is especially important when you have investors or shareholders….for some reason they actually want a company to be profitable – hey I know its “crazy talk” but they want to make money off of their investment.

Authenticity and Character: You reference in your article about having the accountants come in and “shift some of the numbers around” to meet your purposes and that “one of our biggest complaints about management is its tendency to run things by the numbers.

I grant you that the recent financial crisis doesn’t show the best side of the financial sector. But that is an issue of Authenticity and Character. The people who made those decisions were absolutely wrong… but it’s more than “shifting numbers” it’s a question of character.

Also, perhaps one of the reasons the media and advertising business has been dealing with the “rise of procurement” inside of companies is because of the very situation you mentioned agencies are doing – “shifting the numbers.”

Your point that “Mathematics is logical. Marketing is not.”

I could not disagree with you more. The greatest connection engine on the planet “the internet” allows marketers to understand not only what’s working, but what’s not. It helps us determine whether creative is performing… what creative we should run. Marketing is logical and disagree that it’s tough to learn. It’s not. But we make it difficult as marketers and agencies because we don’t take the extra step to understand what the numbers are telling us. Numbers aren’t like some bad voodoo spell. They are a guidebook into the thoughts, hearts and passions of our customers. Metrics are a good thing… it’s allowed us to stop wasteful marketing investments and increase our market share by focusing our efforts.

I was Media Director at HP for 5 years – managing a huge amount of media spend across the world. Every single media rep, agency, etc. told me the same story. Our media (or agency) can deliver sales – my questions back was prove it? Put your money wear your mouth is… if your agency or media property can deliver sales then guess what?... go on 100% commission of each product your campaign or media vehicle sells.

Walk in the Clients Shoes:

You think you’ve got a tough job. Try sitting in the client chair for a week. Where we have to show results, where you’re held to sales, profit and market share numbers, where we have to stand in front of management and explain why something didn’t work. Thus, we need math and metrics to help us make informed decisions on the allocation of our financial and labor resources. If one agency is performing better… guess what? they’ll probably get more business. If a campaign is performing better than another one….we’ll probably make a tough decision to shut it down.

Scott

Customer’s Clock Rules

christina.sullivan — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:20:00 GMT

In a previous blog, http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/ease-of-doing-business/archive/2008/11/20/disneyworld-does-it.aspx, I cite 5 rules for ease of doing business and improving customer experience. The 2^nd rule I cited was that you must “Evaluate your processes and procedures with #1(put the customer first) in mind”. If you are working to transform a critical customer process, you need to know: 1) what you are trying to accomplish? and 2) how do you know when you get there? The latter gets to developing the right measures. Let me give you an example of this. If I was looking at customer turnaround time for a specific process, would I measure time in business hours (the time that the establishment is open) or would I measure it in customer real-time? If you’ve read the title of this blog you should know the answer, but you would be surprised how many companies don’t do this. Customers don’t care if the office was closed between 6pm and 8am. They want a response and they want it now. If they made a request yesterday and don’t get an answer until today, that’s a 24 hour response in their mind. Systems may have limitations that get in the way of measuring your performance in “customer time” but in order to follow the first 2 rules (#1: putting the customer first; and 2: Evaluate your processes and procedures with #1 in mind), you have to ensure your measurements are consistent with the customer view.

Go forth and measure! But, make sure you do it with the customer mindset – not the internal view or just the way the system allows you to.

ROI for IT Infrastructure Monitoring - Measuring what Matters

pspielvogel — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:30:00 GMT

I read an interesting post and related ebook by David Meerman Scott on why traditional marketing ROI measures lead to failure. His premise is that measuring marketing metrics such as number of sales leads captured and press mentions lead to the wrong behaviors and in some ways undermine one of the primary goals of marketing, which is to increase sales and market share. So, why is everyone in both marketing and IT so focused on ROI?

The answer is that focusing on the return of your investments in different parts of the business allows you to allocate scare resources and drive the best returns for the shareholders. They key is tracking the metrics that matter. Here are two examples, one from marketing and one from IT.

In previous positions, I have created marketing dashboards that charted many the items that Mr. Scott slammed. Why would I or other seasoned marketing professionals do this? One reason is that some metrics are relatively easy to track (such as leads captured at a trade show or the number of responses to a marketing campaign). Correlating these to the real goal of increasing sales is much trickier and requires much heavier monitoring infrastructure including obtaining accurate input from sales and customers about the number of touches and how individual marketing campaigns or programs influenced each stage of the sales process. Few companies have the will or discipline to do this.

On the IT side, there are also easily-trackable metrics. Server utilization, power consumption, and application uptime appear on many IT dashboards. While these are certainly important, what really matters is how the IT infrastructure supports the business goals. Business owners care about:

Availability - can my users access the applications they need?
Performance - does the application deliver an acceptable response time?
Data accuracy - does the application maintain data integrity?

Again, tracking these business-focused metrics is harder than focusing on ones that are easy to gather from element managers that often accompany systems. But, the right management software and some automated processes make it straight forward to create IT dashboards with mean. This is what the field of business service management is all about. BSM links the underlying infrastructure and applications to business outcomes such as those listed above.

To learn more about BSM, please visit my colleague Mike Shaw’s BSM blog or download a white paper about HP’s approach to BSM.

In future posts, I and my fellow bloggers will address how robust IT infrastructure monitoring contributes to delivering availability, performance, and accurate data

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

IT project failures

Charlie Bess — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 02:08:27 GMT

I was exchanging emails with Dennis Howlett about his thoughts on improving EDS' blog. He posted an entry about this blog and so an e-mail discussion ensued. In the process of that discussion, he wondered what I thought about this article from Accounting Age magazine discussing an analysis by KPMG of IT project failures. From what I read, it said that projects fail because of bad metrics and poor governance. I can see their point since exposing something to sunlight illuminates as well as disinfects.

The document does make the statement:

'Success is increasingly being defined as achieving the promised benefits, as opposed to the traditional focus on time and budget measures.’

I find this statement entertaining, since the only reason the project exists is to achieve business benefits. Project managers need to have the business needs as the project objective. If it appears the project will not be done on time and meet the objectives - speak up, early and often. Bad news does not get better with age. Part of developing that understanding will be having useful business metrics, and those may not be easy to find. People in the IT industry are often satisfied with metrics that are easy to collect. People in seats, effort spent...

One thing I determined long ago was that most users “know it when they see it.” Putting all the requirements on paper and beating the user over the head with the documentation is rarely a good idea. Flexibility is required in order to do something useful - plan for it. Contracts may need to shift from hours spent to value delivered. If the real value is there, it can be measured and tracked. If it is not there, it's better to stop the project early.

One of the implications of having a more model driven business that assembles solutions is that it will be a more responsive and value based approach. The traditional project management techniques may need to change significantly to remain viable.

I wrote an entry a while back about metrics. Bill Phifer (one of the other EDS fellows) provided me with these thoughts. Unless carefully considered and monitored, metrics themselves can easily become dysfunctional; Robert Austin (Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations) likens this condition to gremlins flying an airplane while at the same time giving the pilot what looks like good operational data to believe he is on course. People do tend to understand the metrics that they are measured on, and over time usually find a way to game them to their advantage. That doesn't mean that metrics are bad, only that they need to be carefully collected, stored, analyzed, interpreted, reported and monitored in such a way that they measure the process, not the person.

One reason that fewer projects fail nowadays is because they are typically smaller and shorter; gone are the days of the monolithic 12-24 month project. The industry has learned that most successful projects are completed with fewer than six people and in less than six months - and that smaller project size also allows for more of the hands-on project status and constant communication that you talk about. It also supports most of the core techniques of agile programming methods. The speed of new business innovations as well as new technology integration was also a factor, as these introductions often made a major "new" system obsolete before it was completed.

Metrics collection and organizational change

Charlie Bess — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 22:34:23 GMT

Too many times, I've seen organizations spend a great deal of time/money collecting information for no business reason. Just because it can be collected! They do this because one of the side effects (and expectations) of almost any process implementation is that metrics are collected about the deployment.

I am amazed about what is collected and how it is used (or not!). I have two simple rules about any kind of metrics deployment:

If you don’t know how you are going to use it, don't collect it.
If you are going to collect it, start using it immediately.

The reason for these two rules is: if you collect information without using it, it’s rarely collected at a quality level that will ensure that it can be used later. The reason you should start using the data immediately, is that then you are forced to have some confidence level about its quality and the people collecting it know it is being used. That is the only way you will drive variation out quickly.

Most of the information organizations collect may be used by some low level people (probably to put a check in a box), but no value is derived by higher level leadership to make better business decisions. That’s a waste. In fact, for some groups the data is collected "at any cost," because the costs associated with it are not tracked. That just does not cut it for me, after all the reason it's being collected is to improve the business.

Business leaders need to be aware of what is being collected and ensure that they use it. With the cost pressures everyone is under, the belts and suspenders approach of having the data someday because we might need it is likely a luxury we can no longer afford.

That's just standard projects, agile development techniques will likely require a whole other approach to metrics as well.