| Goals are essential for taking your personal life and | | | | to help create a shared vision, empowerment, and |
| business prosperity to higher levels of performance, | | | | momentum. |
| satisfaction and success. All too often, best intentions | | | | How to Make Measures Predictive Not all actionable |
| can get derailed over time. Here are 4 basic principles | | | | metrics are predictive of the big-picture goal. Focusing |
| that apply to any resolution, initiative, program, | | | | on predictive actionable metrics leads to desired |
| dashboard, or MBO (management by objectives; | | | | results for big-picture metrics. |
| incentives or stretch goals): | | | | - Inputs & Control Points: Among the root causes |
| 1. Connected - make sure you're focusing on things | | | | identified earlier, some may be inputs to a key process, |
| with strong connections to overall objectives. | | | | and others may be critical junctures within the process |
| 2. Actionable - select strongly connected success | | | | itself. |
| measures that allow you to control outcomes. | | | | - Resources & Culture: The ability of a process to |
| 3. Predictive - emphasize actionable, connected | | | | meet its objectives is often determined by resources, |
| metrics with strong cause-and-effect to objectives. | | | | skills, stakeholder buy-in and cultural factors. These are |
| 4. Sustained - setup the right environment for | | | | levers you might employ to improve the process inputs |
| predictive measures to keep producing strong results. | | | | and process control points. |
| How to Connect to the Big Picture One of the biggest | | | | - Tallies: To track action plan progress, use tallies, |
| metrics mistakes is random selection. The best metrics | | | | check sheets, control charts, run charts, pie charts, or |
| start with the big picture: | | | | any other monitoring method. |
| - Overall Objective: Identify the overall objective of | | | | How to Sustain Results Now that you've built |
| your company or initiative. State it quantitatively. It | | | | momentum in connected, actionable, predictive metrics, |
| should answer the question: "We'll know this is | | | | make sure you get lasting results. |
| successful when we see _____ happen." | | | | - Tashiro Chart: For sustained momentum in leading |
| - Cascading Focus: Like a waterfall, the overall goal is | | | | indicators' progress, the Tashiro Chart is a one-page |
| cascaded to each level of the program or organization, | | | | action plan combined with a trend chart of the action |
| to identify successive contributions to the big-picture | | | | plan's leading indicator. |
| goal. | | | | - Flag Chart: For a birdseye view of what's going well, |
| - Metrics: Metric definition moves in the opposite | | | | the Flag Chart gives management a quick indication of |
| direction of the cascading goals. How will you measure | | | | trends, highlights, and concerns. |
| progress of the action plan at the lowest level of the | | | | - Balanced Scorecard: Like a pilot's dashboard of dials |
| organization or initiative? How will this roll upward | | | | reflecting the spectrum of an airplane's key metrics, a |
| through the successive layers of the organization or | | | | Balanced Scorecard concisely depicts the spectrum of |
| initiative? | | | | key metrics for an entire organization or initiative. |
| - Validate: Scrutinize your answers for logic and refine | | | | Ideally, it includes layers of inputs, control points, and |
| as needed. | | | | levers. |
| How to Make Measures Actionable Metrics at the | | | | - Goldmines Verus Landmines: Appropriate use of |
| lowest layer of an initiative or organization have the | | | | dashboards is imperative. It's quite common for metrics |
| highest actionability. A focus on the most actionable | | | | to be mis-used, mis-trusted and mis-managed. What |
| metrics is essential for 'moving the needle' of | | | | gets measured gets done, so improper use of metrics |
| big-picture metrics. | | | | can lead to unintended behaviors that may negate the |
| - Opportunity or Problem: When you identify a problem | | | | expected value of having metrics in the first place. |
| or opportunity that needs to be addressed, this is the | | | | Impossible to Measure? Many business and personal |
| symptom that you will explore for root cause analysis. | | | | efforts are inherently non-quantitative. It's difficult to see |
| Start with the observable problem or opportunity, not | | | | any way of measuring such efforts. Yet there's |
| with possible solutions. | | | | always an associated leading indicator that can be |
| - Objective & Goal: For the symptom identified, | | | | tracked with yes/no, low/medium/high, or other metric |
| specify the non-quantitative goal as well as the | | | | that can be monitored over time to observe trends |
| quantitative objective before exploring root causes | | | | and assess predictive strength. Creativity tools are |
| and metrics. | | | | great for viewing these challenges constructively. For |
| - Root Cause: Identify the root cause(s) of the overall | | | | hard-to-quantify topics, ask yourself: what's the big |
| symptom by using the 5 Why's technique or the | | | | picture objective, what's actionable, what's predictive, |
| Fishbone Diagram. | | | | and how can it become sustainable over time? |
| - Validate: Validate the root cause(s) to make sure it's | | | | To increase likelihood of achieving great results for any |
| the malfunctioning issue that ties clearly to the | | | | goal, identify connected and actionable focus areas, |
| symptom. | | | | and emphasize predictive metrics with well-planned |
| - Shared Vision: Use your root cause analysis diagram | | | | tools for sustained momentum and success. |